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A TRAVELLER IN 
WAR-TIME 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO - DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 




W 
E- 

K 
Q 

I— I 



A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 

WITH AN ESSAY ON 

THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 
AND THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA 



BY 

WINSTON CHURCHILL 

Author of *'The Inside of the Cup," "The Dwelling 
Place of Light," etc. 



^m f afk 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
. 1918 

All rights reserved 






COPTRIGHT. 1918 
Bt CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

CoprEiGirx, 1918 
Bt the MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Set up and electrotyped. Published July, 1918. 



JUL -8 1918 



£)aA501086 



PEEFACE 

I AM reprinting here, in response to requests, certain 
recent experiences in Great Britain and Erance. 
These were selected in the hope of conveying to Amer- 
ican readers some idea of the atmosphere, of '' what it is 
like '' in these countries under the inmaediate shadow 
of the battle clouds. It was what I myself most wished 
to know. My idea was first to send home my impres- 
sions while they were fresh, and to refrain as far as 
possible from comment and judgment until I should 
have had time to make a fuller survey. Hence I chose 
as a title for these articles,— intended to be prelim- 
inary,—" A Traveller in War-Time." I tried to banish 
from my mind all previous impressions gained from 
reading. I wished to be free for the moment to accept 
and record the chance invitation or adventure, wherever 
met with, at the Eront, in the streets of Paris, in 
Ireland, or on the London omnibus. Later on, I hoped 
to write a book summarizing the changing social condi- 
tions as I had found them. 

Unfortunately for me, my stay was unexpectedly cut 



PREFACE 

while the accomplishment of General Carey, in stopping 
the gap with an improvised force of non-combatants, 
will go down in history. 

In an attempt to bring home to myself, as well as to 
my readers, a realization of what American partici- 
pation in this war means or should mean, I have added 
to the volume an essay on the American Contribution 
and the Democratic Idea. 

WiNSTOisr Churchill. 



CONTENTS 

A Traveller in War-Time. page 

Chapter I 3 

Chapter II 31 

Chapter III 65 

An Essay on the American Contribution and the 

Democratic Idea 99 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

*' The American Chateau " behind the British lines . Frontispiece 

FACING 
PAGE , 

Chateau of Versailles 18-/ 



Viee-Admiral Sims and his Chief of Staff, Captain Pringle 

of the Destroyer Flotilla 34 

American Y. M. C. A. " hut " in the Strand, London ... 40 



King George and Lloyd George in conversation with an 

American officer 46^ 



Boating at Eton 52 

The Square at Arras 90^ 

The Square at Albert, showing the Leaning Virgin .... 90 



CHAPTEE I 



A TRAVELLER IN 
WAR-TIME 



CHAPTER I 



TOWARD the end of the summer of 1917 it was 
very hot in i^ew York, and hotter still aboard the 
transatlantic liner thrust between the piers. One 
glance at our cabins, at the crowded decks and dining- 
room, at the little writing-room above, where the ink 
had congealed in the ink-wells, sufficed to bring home to 
us that the days of luxurious sea travel, of a la carte 
restaurants, and Louis Seize bedrooms were gone — at 
least for a period. The prospect of a voyage of nearly 
two weeks was not enticing. The ship, to be sure, was 
far from being the best of those still ruiming on a line 
which had gained a magic reputation of immunity from 
submarines ; three years ago she carried only second and 
third class passengers ! But most of us were in a hurry 
to get to the countries where war had already become a 
grim and terrible reality. In one way or another we 
had all enlisted. 

3 



4 A TKAYELLER I:N^ WAE-TIME 

By ^^ we " I mean the American passengers. The 
first welcome discovery among the crowd wandering 
aimlessly and somewhat disconsolately about the decks 
was the cheerful face of a friend whom at first I did 
not recognize because of his amazing disguise in uni- 
form. Hitherto he had been associated in iny mind 
with dinner parties and clubs. That life was past. He 
had laid up his yacht and joined the Red Cross and, 
henceforth, for an indeterminable period, he was to 
abide amidst the discomforts and dangers of the Western 
Front, with ^ve days' leave every three months. The 
members of a group similarly attired whom I found 
gathered by the after-rail were likewise cheerful. Two 
well-kno^vn specialists from the Massachusetts General 
Hospital made significant the hegira now taking place 
that threatens to leave our country, like Britain, almost 
doctorless. When I reached France it seemed to me 
that I met all the celebrated medical men I ever heard 
of. A third in the group was a business man from the 
Middle West who had wound up his affairs and left a 
startled family in charge of a trust company. Though 
his physical activities had hitherto consisted of an occa- 
sional mild game of golf, he wore his khaki like an old 
campaigner; and he seemed undaunted by the prospect 
— still somewhat remotely ahead of him — of a winter 
journey across the Albanian Mountains from the ^gean 
to the Adriatic ! 



A TEAVELLER m WAR-TIME 5 

After a restless night, we sailed away in the hot dawn 
of a Wednesday. The shores of America faded behind 
us, and as the days went by, we had the odd sense of 
threading uncharted seas; we found it more and more 
difficult to believe that this empty, lonesome ocean was 
the Atlantic in the twentieth century. Once we saw a 
four-master ; once a shy, silent steamer avoided us, west- 
ward bound ; and once in mid-ocean, tossed on a sea sun- 
silvered under a radk of clouds, we overtook a gallant 
little schooner out of New Bedford or Gloucester — a 
forthfarer, too. 

Meanwhile, amongst the Americans, the socializing 
process had begun. Many elements which in a former 
stratified existence would never have been brought into 
contact were fusing by the pressure of a purpose, of a 
great adventure common to us all. On the upper deck, 
high above the waves, was a little fumoir which, by some 
odd trick of association, reminded me of the villa for- 
merly occupied by the Kaiser in Corfu — perhaps be- 
cause of the faience plaques set in the walls — although 
I cannot now recall whether the villa has faience plaques 
or not. The room was, of course, on the order of a 
French provincial cafe, and as such delighted the 
bourgeoisie monopolizing the alcove tables and joking 
with the fat steward. Here in this fumoir, lawyers, 
doctors, business men of all descriptions, newspaper cor- 
respondents, movie photographers, and millionaires who 



6 A TKAVELLER IN WAK-TIME 

had never crossed save in a cabine de luxe, rubbed elbows 
and exchanged views and played bridge together. 
There were Y. M. C. A. people on their way to the 
various camps, reconstruction workers intending to 
build temporary homes for the homeless French, and 
youngsters in the uniform of the American Field Serv- 
ice, going over to drive camions and ambulances ; many 
of whom, without undue regret, had left college after a 
freshman year. They invaded the fumoir, undaunted, 
to practise atrocious French on the phlegmatic steward ; 
they took possession of a protesting piano in the banal 
little salon and sang : '^ We'll not come back till it's 
over over there." And in the evening, on the darkened 
decks, we listened and thrilled to the refrain : 

" There's a long, long trail a-winding 
Into the land of my dreams." 

We were Argonauts — even the Ked Cross ladies on 
their way to establish rest camps behind the lines and 
brave the mud and rains of a winter in eastern France. 
!N^one, indeed, were more imbued with the forthfaring 
spirit than these women, who were leaving, without 
regret, sheltered, comfortable lives to face hardships and 
brave dangers without a question. And no sharper 
proof of the failure of the old social order to provide for 
human instincts and needs could be found than the con- 



A TKAVELLEE IN WAE-TIME Y 

viction they gave of new and vitalizing forces released 
in them. The timidities v^ith which their sex is sup- 
posedly encumbered had disappeared, and even the pos- 
sibility of a disaster at sea held no terrors for them. 
When the sun fell down into the warm waters of the 
Gulf Stream and the cabins below were sealed — and 
thus become insupportable — they settled themselves for 
the night in their steamer-chairs and smiled at the re- 
mark of M. le Commissaire that it was a good " season '' 
for submarines. The moonlight filtered through the 
chinks in the burlap shrouding the deck. About 3 a. m. 
the khaki-clad lawyer from Milwaukee became communi- 
cative, the Red Cross ladies produced chocolate. It was 
the genial hour before the final nap, from which one 
awoke abruptly at the sound of squeegees and brooms to 
find the deck a river of sea water, on whose banks a wild 
scramble for slippers and biscuit-boxes invariably en- 
sued. 'No experience could have been more socializing. 
" Well, it's a relief,'' one of the ladies exclaimed, " not 
to be travelling with half a dozen trunks and a hat-box ! 
Oh, yes, I realize what I'm doing. I'm going to live 
in one of those flimsy portable houses with twenty cots 
and no privacy and wear the same clothes for months, 
but it's better than thrashing around looking for some- 
thing to do and never finding it, never getting anything 
real to spend one's energy on. I've closed my country 



8 A TKAVELIER IX WAE-TIME 

house, IVe sublet mv apartment, IVe done with teas 
and bridge, and I'm happier than I've been in my life — 
even if I don't get enough sleep." 

Another ladv, who looked still young, had two sons in 
the armv. "' There was nothino: for me to do but sit 
around the house and wait, and I want to be useful. My 
husband has to stav at home: he can't leave his busi- 
ness." Be useful ! There she struck the new and ag- 
gressive note of emancipation from the restricted self- 
sacrifice of the old order, of wider service for the un- 
named and the unknown; and, above all, for the wider 
self-realization of which service is but a by-product. I 
recall particularly among these women a yoimg widow 
with an eager look in clear grey eyes that gazed east- 
ward into the unknown with hope renewed. Had she 
lived a quarter of a century ago she might have been 
doomed to slow desiccation. There are thousands of 
such women in France today, and to them the great 
war has brou£;ht salvation. 

From what country other than America could so many 
thousands of pilgTims — even before our nation had 
entered the war — have hurried across a wide ocean to 
take their part \ Xo matter what religion we profess, 
whether it be Calvinism, or Catholicism, we are indi- 
vidualists, pragmatists, empiricists for ever. Our faces 
are set toward strange worlds presently to rise out of 
the sea and take on form and colour and substance — 



A TEAVELLEK IN WAR-TIME 9 

worlds of new aspirations, of new ideas and new values. 
And on this voyage I was reminded of Josiah Royce's 
splendid summary of the American philosophy — of the 
American religion as sot forth by William James: 
" The spirit of the frontiers-man, of the gold-seeker or 
the home-builder transferred to the metaphysical or to 
the religious realm. There is a far-off home, our long- 
lost spiritual fortune. Experience alone can guide us 
to the place where these things are, hence indeed you 
need experience. You can only win your way on the 
frontier unless you are willing to live there." Through 
the pall of horror and tragedy the American sees a 
vision; for him it is not merely a material and bloody 
contest of arms and men, a military victory to be gained 
over an aggressive and wrong-minded people. It is a 
world calamity, indeed, but a calamity, since it has 
come, to be spiritualized and utilized for the benefit 
of the future society of mankind. It must be made to 
serve a purpose in helping to liberate the world from 
sentimentalism, ignorance, close-mindedness, and cant. 



II 



One night we entered the danger zone. There had 
been an entertainment in the little salon which, 
packed with passengers, had gradually achieved the 
temperature and humidity of a Turkish bath. For the 



10 A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 

ports had been closed as tight as gaskets could make 
them, the electric fans, as usual, obstinately " refused to 
march.'' After the amateur speechmaking and concert 
pieces an Italian violinist, who had thro^vn over a lucra- 
tive contract to become a soldier, played exquisitely ; and 
one of the French sisters we had seen walking the deck 
with the mincing steps of the cloister sang, somewhat 
precariously and pathetically, the Ave Maria. Its 
pathos was of the past, and after she had finished, as we 
fled into the open air, we were conscious of having 
turned our backs irrevocably yet determinedly upon an 
era whose life and convictions the music of the composer 
so beautifully expressed. And the sister's sweet with- 
ered face was reminiscent of a missal, one bright with 
colour, and still shining faintly. A missal in a library 
of modern books ! 

On deck a fine rain was blowing through a gap in 
our burlap shroud, a phosphorescent fringe of foam 
hissed along the sides of the ship, giving the illusory ap- 
pearance *of our deadlights open and ablaze, exaggerat- 
ing the sinister blackness of the night. We were, 
apparently, a beacon in that sepia waste where modem 
undersea monsters were lurking. 

There were on board other elements which in the nor- 
mal times gone by would have seemed disquieting 
enough. The evening after we had left JSTew York, 
while we were still off the coast of Long Island, I saw 



A TKAVELLER IN WAK-TIME 11 

on the poop a crowd of steerage passengers listening 
intently to harangues by speakers addressing them from 
the top of a pile of life rafts. Armenians, I was told, on 
their way to fight the Turks, all recruited in America 
by one frenzied woman who had seen her child cut in 
two by a German officer. Twilight was gathering as 
I joined the group, the sea was silvered by the light of 
an August moon floating serenely between swaying 
stays. The orator's passionate words and gestures 
evoked wild responses from his hearers, whom the drag 
of an ancient hatred had snatched from the peaceful 
asylum of the west. This smiling, happy folk, which 
I had seen in our manufacturing towns and cities, 
were now transformed, atavistic — all save one, a stu- 
dent, who stared wistfully through his spectacles across 
the waters. Later, when twilight deepened, when the 
moon had changed from silver to gold, the orators gave 
place to a singer. He had been a bootblack in America. 
IN'ow he had become a bard. His plaintive minor chant 
evoked, one knew not how, the flavour of that age-long 
history of oppression and wrong these were now de- 
termined to avenge. Their conventional costumes were 
proof that we had harboured them — almost, indeed, 
assimilated them. And suddenly they had reverted. 
They were going to slaughter the Turks. 

On a bright Saturday afternoon we steamed into the 
wide month of the Gironde, a name stirring vague mem- 



12 A TEAVELLEK IN WAK-TIME 

ories of romance and terror. The French passengers 
gazed wistfully at the low-lying strip of sand and for- 
est, but our uniformed pilgrims crowded the rail and 
hailed it as the promised land of self-realization. A 
richly coloured watering-place slid into view, as in a 
moving-picture show. There was, indeed, all the 
reality and unreality of the cinematograph about our 
arrival ; presently the reel would end abruptly, and we 
should find ourselves pushing our way out of the empty- 
ing theatre into a rainy street. The impression of un- 
reality in the face of visual evidence persisted into the 
night when, after an afternoon at anchor, we glided up 
the river, our decks and ports ablaze across the land. 
Silhouettes of tall poplars loomed against the blackness ; 
occasionally a lamp revealed the milky-blue fagade of 
a house. This was France ! War-torn France — at 
last vividly brought home to us when a glare appeared 
on the sky, growing brighter and brighter until, at a 
turn of the river, abruptly we came abreast of vomit- 
ing furnaces, thousands of electric lights strung like 
beads over the crest of a hill, and, below these, dim 
rows of houses, all of a sameness, stretching along 
monotonous streets. A munitions town in the night! 
One could have tossed a biscuit on the stone wharfs 
where the workmen, crouching over their tasks, straight- 
ened up at sight of us and cheered. And one cried out 
hoarsely, '' Vous venez twus sauver, vous Americains " 



A TEAYELLER IN WAE-TIME 13 

— " You come to save us " — an exclamation I was to 
hear again in the days that followed. 

Ill 

All day long, as the rapide hurried us through the 
smiling wine country and past the well-remembered 
chateaux of the Loire, we wondered how we should find 
Paris — beautiful Paris, saved from violation as by a 
miracle ! Our first discovery, after we had pushed our 
way out of the dim station into the obscurity of the 
street, was that of the absence of taxi-cabs. The horse- 
drawn buses ranged along the curb were reserved for 
the foresighted and privileged few. Men and women 
were rushing desperately about in search of conveyances, 
and in the midst of this confusion, undismayed, debon- 
nair, I spied a rugged, slouch-hatted figure standing un- 
der a lamp — the unmistakable American soldier. 

" Aren't there any cabs in Paris ? " I asked. 

" Oh, yes, they tell me they're here," he said. " I've 
given a man a dollar to chase one." 

Evidently one of our millionaire privates who have 
aroused such burnings in the heart of the French poilu, 
with his -Q-ve sous a day! We left him there, and 
staggered across the Seine with our bags. A French 
officer approached us. " You come from America," he 
said. " Let me help you." There was just enough 



14 A TKAVELLEE m WAR-TIME 

light in the streets to prevent us from getting utterly 
lost, and we recognized the dark mass of the Tuileries 
as we crossed the gardens. The hotel we sought was 
still there, and its menu, save for the war-bread and the 
tiny portion of sugar, as irreproachable as ever. 

The next morning, as if by magic, hundreds of taxis 
had sprung into existence, though they were much in 
demand. And in spite of the soldiers thronging the 
sunlit streets, Paris was seemingly the same Paris one 
had always known, gay — insouciante, pleasure-bent. 
The luxury shops appeared to be thriving, the world- 
renowned restaurants to be doing business as usual ; to 
judge from the prices, a little better than usual; the 
expensive hotels were full. It is not the real France, 
of course, yet it seemed none the less surprising that it 
should still exist. Oddly enough the presence of such 
overwhelming numbers of soldiers should have failed 
to strike the note of war, emphasized that of lavishness, 
of the casting off of mundane troubles for which the 
French capital has so long been known. But so it was. 
Most of these soldiers were here precisely with the ob- 
ject of banishing from their minds the degradations and 
horrors of the region from which they had come, and 
which was so unbelievably near; a few hours in an 
automobile — less than that in one of those dragon-fly 
machines we saw intermittently hovering in the blue 
above our heads ! 



A TKAVELLEE IN WAE-TIME 15 

Paris, to most Americans, means that concentrated 
little district de luxe of which the Place Vendome is the 
centre, and we had always unconsciously thought of it 
as in the possession of the Anglo-Saxons. So it seems 
today. One saw hundreds of French soldiers, of course, 
in all sorts of uniforms, from the new grey blue and 
visor to the traditional cloth blouse and kepi; once in 
a while a smart French officer. The English and Cana- 
dians, the Australians, jSTew Zealanders, and Americans 
were much in evidence. Set them down anywhere on 
the face of the globe, under any conditions conceivable, 
and you could not surprise them ; such was the impres- 
sion. The British officers and even the British Tommies 
were hlase, wearing the air of the semaine Anglaise, and 
the " five o'clock tea,'' as the French delight to call it. 
That these could have come direct from the purgatory 
of the trenches seemed unbelievable. The Anzacs, with 
looped-up hats, strolled about, enjoying themselves, 
halting before the shops in the Eue de la Paix to gaze 
at the priceless jewellery there, or stopping at a sidewalk 
cafe to enjoy a drink. Our soldiers had not seen the 
front ; many of them, no doubt, were on leave from the 
training-camps, others were on duty in Paris, but all 
seemed in a hurry to get somewhere, bound for a defi- 
nite destination. They might have been in New York 
or San Francisco. It was a novel sight, indeed, to 
observe them striding across the Place Vendome with- 



16 A TKAVELLER 11^ WAR-TIME 

out so much as deigning to cast a glance at the column 
dedicated to the great emperor who fought that other 
world-war a century ago; to see our square-shouldered 
officers hustling around corners in Ford and Packard 
automobiles. And the atmosphere of our communica- 
tion headquarters was so essentially one of " getting 
things done " as to make one forget the mediaeval nar- 
rowness of the Rue Sainte Anne, and the inconvenient 
French private-dwelling arrangements of the house. 
You were transported back to America. Such, too, was 
the air of our Red Cross establishment in the ancient 
building facing the Palace de la Concorde, where the 
unfortunate Louis lost his head. 

History had been thrust into the background. I was 
never more aware of this than when, shortly after dawn 
Wednesday, the massive grey pile of the Palace of 
Versailles suddenly rose before me. As the motor shot 
through the empty Place d'Armes I made a desperate 
attempt to summon again a vivid impression, when I 
had first stood there many years ago, of an angry Paris 
mob beating against that grill, of the Swiss guards dying 
on the stairway for their Queen. But it was no use. 
France has undergone some subtle change, yet I knew I 
was in France. I knew it when we left Paris and sped 
through the dim leafy tunnels of the Bois; when I be- 
held a touch of filtered sunlight on the dense blue thatch 
of the marroniers behind the walls of a vast estate once 



A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 17 

dedicated to the sports and pleasures of Kings ; when I 
caught glimpses of silent chateaux mirrored in still 
waters. 

I was on my way, with one of our naval officers, to 
visit an American naval base on the western coast. It 
was France, but the laughter had died on her lips. A 
few women and old men and children were to be seen 
in the villages, a bent figure in a field, an occasional 
cart that drew aside as we hurried at eighty kilometers 
an hour along deserted routes drawn as with a ruler 
across the land. Sometimes the road dipped into a 
canyon of poplars, and the sky between their crests was 
a tiny strip of mottled blue and white. The sun crept 
in and out, the clouds cast shadows on the hills; here 
and there the tower of lonely church or castle broke the 
line of a distant ridge. Morning-glories nodded over 
lodge walls where the ivy was turning crimson, and the 
little gardens were masses of colours — French colours 
like that in the beds of the Tuileries, brick-red gerani- 
ums and dahlias, yellow marigolds and purple asters. 

We lunched at one of the little inns that for genera- 
tions have been tucked away in the narrow streets of 
provincial towns; this time a Cheval Blanc, with an 
unimposing front and a blaze of sunshine in its heart. 
After a dejeuner fit for the most exacting of hon viveurs 
we sat in that courtyard and smoked, while an ancient 
waiter served us with coffee that dripped through silver 



18 A TEAVELLEE IN WAE-TIME 

percolators into our glasses. The tourists have fled. 
" If happily you should come again, monsieur," said 
madame, as she led me with pardonable pride through 
her immaculate bedrooms and salons with wavy floors. 
And I dwelt upon a future holiday there, on the joys of 
sharing with a friend that historic place. The next 
afternoon I lingered in another town, built on a little 
hill ringed about with ancient walls, from whose battle- 
ments tide-veined marshes stretched away to a gleaming 
sea. A figTire flitting through the cobbled streets, a 
woman in black who sat sewing, sewing in a window, 
only served to heighten the impression of emptiness, to 
give birth to the odd fancy that some alchemic quality 
in the honeyed sunlight now steeping it must have pre- 
served the place through the ages. But in the white 
close surrounding the church were signs that life still 
persisted. A peasant was drawing water at the pump, 
and the handle made a noise ; a priest chatted with three 
French ladies who had come over from a neighbouring 
seaside resort. And then a woman in deep mourning 
emerged from a tiny shop and took her bicycle from 
against the wall and spoke to me. 

'' Vous etes Americain, monsieur? '* 

I acknowledged it. 

" Yous venez nous sauver? " — the same question I 
had heard on the lips of the workman in the night. " I 
hope so, madame," I replied, and would have added. 




British Pictorial Service. 
CHATEAU OP VERSAILLES 



A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 19 

" We come also to save ourselves." She looked at me 
with sad, questioning eyes, and I knew that for her — 
and alas for many like her — we were too late. When 
she had mounted her wheel and ridden away I bought 
a Matin and sat down on a doorstep to read about Keren- 
sky and the. Russian Revolution. The thing seemed in- 
credible here — war seemed incredible, and yet its 
tentacles had reached out to this peaceful Old World 
spot and taken a heavy toll. Once more I sought the 
ramparts, only to be reminded by those crumbling, ma- 
chicolated ruins that I was in a war-ridden land. Few 
generations had escaped the pestilence. 

At no great distance lay the little city which had 
been handed over to us by the French Government for a 
naval base, one of the ports where our troops and sup- 
plies are landed. Those who know provincial France 
will visualize its narrow streets and reticent shops, its 
grey-white and ecru houses all more or less of the same 
design, with long French windows guarded by orna- 
mental balconies of cast iron — a city that has never 
experienced such a thing as a real-estate boom. Im- 
agine, against such a background, the bewildering effect 
of the dynamic presence of a few regiments of our new 
army! It is a curious commentary on this war that 
one does not think of these young men as soldiers, but as 
citizens engaged in a scientific undertaking of a mag- 
nitude unprecedented. You come unexpectedly upon 



20 A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 

truck-loads of tanned youngsters, whose features, de- 
spite flannel shirts and campaign hats, sununon up mem- 
ories of Harvard Square and the Yale Yard, of campuses 
at Berkeley and Ithaca. The youthful drivers of these 
camions are alert, intent, but a hard day's work on the 
docks by no means suffices to dampen the spirits of the 
passengers, who whistle ragtime airs as they bump over 
the cobbles. And the note they strike is presently sus- 
tained by a glimpse, on a siding, of an efficient-looking 
Baldwin, ranged alongside several of the tiny French 
locomotives of yesterday; sustained, too, by an ac- 
quaintance with the young colonel in command of the 
town. Though an officer of the regular army, he brings 
home to one the fact that the days of the military mar- 
tinet have gone for ever. He is military, indeed — erect 
and soldierly — but fortune has amazingly made him a 
mayor and an autocrat, a builder, and in some sense a 
railway-manager and superintendent of docks. And to 
these functions have been added those of police com- 
missioner, of administrator of social welfare and hy- 
giene. It will be a comfort to those at home to learn 
that their sons in our army in France are cared for as no 
enlisted men have ever been cared for before. 

IV 

By the end of September I had reached England, 
eager to gain a fresh impression of conditions there. 



A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 21 

The weather in London was mild and clear. The third 
evening after I had got settled in one of those delight- 
fully English hotels in the heart of the city, yet re- 
moved from the traffic, with letter-boxes that still bear 
the initials of Victoria, I went to visit some American 
naval officers in their sitting-room on the ground floor. 
The cloth had not been removed from the dinner-table, 
around which we were chatting, when a certain strange 
sound reached our ears — a sound not to be identified 
with the distant roar of the motor-busses in Pall Mall, 
nor with the sharp bark of the taxi-horns, although not 
unlike them. We sat listening intently, and heard the 
sound again. 

" The Germans have come," one of the officers re- 
marked, as he finished his coffee. The other looked at 
his watch. It was nine o'clock. " They must have left 
their lines about seven," he said. 

In spite of the fact that our newspapers at home had 
made me familiar with these aeroplane raids, as I sat 
there, amidst those comfortable surroundings, the thing 
seemed absolutely incredible. To fly one hundred and 
fifty miles across the Channel and southern England, 
bomb London, and fly back again by midnight ! We 
were going to be bombed ! The anti-aircraft guns were 
already searching the sky for the invaders. It is sinis- 
ter, and yet you are seized by an overwhelming curiosity 
that draws you, first to pull aside the heavy curtains of 



22 A TKAVELLEK IN WAK-TIME 

the window, and then to rush out into the dark street — 
both proceedings in the worst possible form! The lit- 
tle street was deserted, but in Pall Mall the dark forms 
of busses could be made out scurrying for shelter, one 
wondered where ? Above the roar of London, the pop ! 
pop! pop! of the defending guns could be heard now 
almost continuously, followed by the shrieks and moans 
of the shrapnel shells as they passed close overhead. 
They sounded like giant rockets, and even as rockets 
some of them broke into a cascade of sparks. Star shells 
they are called, bursting, it seemed, among the immuta- 
ble stars themselves that burned serenely on. And 
there were other stars like l^ovember meteors hurrying 
across space — the lights of the British planes scouring 
the heavens for their relentless enemies. Everywhere 
the restless white rays of the searchlights pierced the 
darkness, seeking, but seeking in vain, l^ot a sig-n of 
the intruders was to be seen. I w^as induced to return 
to the sitting-room. 

" But what are they shooting at ? '' I asked. 

" Listen," said one of the officers. There came a lull 
in the firing and then a faint, droning noise like the 
humming of insects on a still summer day. " It's all 
they have to shoot at, that noise." 

" But their own planes ? " I objected. 

" The Gotha has two engines, it has a slightly dif- 
ferent noise, when you get used to it. You'd better step 



A TKAVELLER IN WAE-TIME 23 

out of that window. It's against the law to show light, 
and if a bomb falls in the street you'd be filled with 
glass." I overcame my fascination and obeyed. " It 
isn't only the bombs," my friend went on, " it's the 
falling shrapnel, too*" 

The noise made by those bombs is unmistakable, un- 
forgetable, and quite distinct from the chorus of the 
guns and shrapnel — a crashing note, reverberating, sus- 
tained, like the E minor of some giant calliope. 

In face of the raids, which coincide with the coming 
of the moon, London is calm, but naturally indignant 
over such methods of warfare. The damage done is 
ridiculously small ; the percentage of deaths and injuries 
insignificant. There exists, in every large city, a riff- 
raff to get panicky : these are mostly foreigners ; they 
seek the Tubes, and some the crypt of St. Paul's, for it 
is wise to get under shelter during the brief period of 
the raids, and most citizens obey the warnings of the 
police. It is odd, indeed, that more people are not hurt 
by shrapnel. The Friday following the raid I have 
described I went out of town for a week-end, and re- 
turned on Tuesday to be informed that a shell had gone 
through the roof outside of the room I had vacated, 
and the ceiling and floor of the bedroom of one of the 
officers who lived below. He was covered with dust 
and debris, his lights went out, but he calmly stepped 
through the window. " You'd best have your dinner 



24 A TKAVELLEK IN WAR-TIME 

early, sir/' I was told by the waiter on my return. 
" Last night a lady had her soup up-stairs, her chicken 
in the office, and her coffee in the cellar.'' It is worth 
while noting that she had all three. Another evening, 
when I was dining with Sir James Barrie, he showed me 
a handful of shrapnel fragments. "" I gathered them 
off the roof," he informed me. And a lady next to 
whom I sat at luncheon told me in a matter-of-fact tone 
that a bomb had fallen the night before in the garden of 
her town house. " It was quite disagreeable," she said, 
" and broke all our windows on that side." 

During the last raids before the moon disappeared, by 
a new and ingenious system of barrage fire the Germans 
were driven off. The question of the ethics of reprisals 
is agitating London. 

One " raid," which occurred at midday, is worth re- 
cording. I was on my way to our Embassy when, in 
the residential quarter through which I passed, I found 
all the housemaids in the areas gazing up at the sky, 
and I was told by a man in a grocer's cart that the Huns 
had come again. But the invader on this occasion 
turned out to be a British aviator from one of the camps 
who was bringing a message to London. The warmth 
of his reception was all that could be desired, and he 
alighted hastily in the first open space that presented 
itself. 



A TKAVELLER m WAK-TIME 25 

Looking back to the time when I left America, I can 
recall the expectation of finding a Britain beginning to 
show signs of distress. I was prepared to live on a 
small ration. And the impression of the scarcity of 
food was seemingly confirmed when the table was being 
set for the first meal at my hotel ; when the waiter, who 
chanced to be an old friend, pointed to a little bowl 
half -full of sugar and exclaimed : " I ought to warn 
you, sir, it's all you're to have for a week, and I'm 
sorry to say you're only allowed a bit of bread, too." 
It is human perversity to want a great deal of bread 
when bread becomes scarce ; even war bread, which, by 
the way, is better than white. But the rest of the 
luncheon, when it came, proved that John Bull was 
under no necessity of stinting himself. Save for wheat 
and sugar, he is not in want. Everywhere in London 
you are confronted by signs of an incomprehensible 
prosperity; everywhere, indeed, in Great Britain, 
There can be no doubt about that of the wage-earners 
— nothing like it has ever been seen before. One sure 
sign of this is the phenomenal sale of pianos to house- 
holds whose occupants had never dreamed of such lux- 
uries. And not once, but many times, have I read in 
the newspapers of workingmen's families of four or ^ve 
which are gaining collectively more than five hundred 
pounds a year. The economic and social significance 



26 A TEAYELLEK IIN" WAR-TIME 

of this tendency, the new attitude of the working 
classes, the ferment it is causing need not be dwelt upon 
here. That England will be a changed England is un- 
questionable. 

The London theatres are full, the " movies " crowded, 
and you have to wait your turn for a seat at a restaurant. 
Bond Street and Piccadillv are doinc: a thriving busi- 
ness — never so thriving, you are told, and presently 
you are willing to believe it. The vendor beggars, so 
familiar a sight a few years ago, have all but disap- 
peared, and you may walk from Waterloo Station to the 
Ha;)Tnarket without so much as meeting a needy soul 
anxious to carry your bag. Taxicabs are in great de- 
mand. And one odd result of the scarcity of what the 
English are pleased to call ^' petrol," by which they 
mean gasoline, is the reappearance of that respectable, 
but almost obsolete animal, the family carriage-horse ; of 
that equally obsolete vehicle, the victoria. The men on 
the box are invariably in black. In spite of taxes to 
make the hair of an American turn grey, in spite of lav- 
ish charities, the wealthy classes still seem wealthy — if 
the expression may be allowed. That they are not so 
wealthy as they were goes without saying. In the coun- 
try houses of the old aristocracy the most rigid economy 
prevails. There are new fortunes, undoubtedly, muni- 
tions and war fortunes made before certain measures 



A TKAVELLEK IN WAR-TIME 27 

were taken to control profits ; and some establishments, 
including a few supported by American accumulations, 
still exhibit the number of men servants and amount of 
gold plate formerly thought adequate. But in most of 
these great houses maids have replaced tbe butlers and 
footmen; mansions have been given over for hospitals; 
gardeners are fighting in the trenches, and courts and 
drives of country places are often overgrown with grass 
and weeds. 

" Yes, we do dine in public quite often," said a very 
great lady. " It's cheaper than keeping servants." 

Two of her three sons had been killed in Prance, 
but she did not mention this. The English do not 
advertise their sorrows. Still another explanation: 
when husbands and sons and brothers come back across 
the Channel for a few days' leave after long months in 
the trenches, nothing is too good for them. And when 
these days have flown, there is always the possibility that 
there may never be another leave. Not long ago I read 
a heart-rending article about the tragedies of the good- 
byes in the stations and the terminal hotels — tragedies 
hidden by silence and a smile. " Well, so long," says 
an officer — ^' bring back a V. C," cries his sister from 
the group on the platform, and he waves his hand in 
deprecation as the train pulls out, lights his pipe, and 
pretends to be reading the Sphere. 



28 A TEAVELLEK IN WAE-TIME 

Some evening, perchance, you happen to be in the 
dark street outside of Charing Cross station. An oc- 
casional hooded lamp throws a precarious gleam on a 
long line of men carrying — so gently — stretchers on 
which lie the silent forms of rich and poor alike. 



CHAPTER II 



CHAPTEK II 



FOR the student of history who is able to place him- 
self within the stream of evolution the really im- 
portant events of today are not taking place on the 
battle lines, but behind them. The kev-note of the new 
era has been struck in Russia. And as I write these 
words, after the Italian retreat, a second revolution 
seems possible. For three years one has thought in- 
evitably of 1789, and of the ensuing world conflict out of 
which issued the beginnings of democracy. History 
does not repeat itself, yet evolution is fairly consistent. 
While our attention has been focused on the military 
drama enacted before our eyes and recorded in the news- 
papers, another drama, unpremeditated but of vastly 
greater sigTiificance, is unfolding itself behind the stage. 
I*Tever in the history of the world were generals and ad- 
mirals, statesmen and politicians so sensitive to or con- 
cerned about public opinion as they are today. 

From a military point of view the situation of the 
Allies at the present writing is far from reassuring. 

Germany and her associates have the advantage of in- 

31 



32 A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 

terior lines, of a single dominating and purposeful lead- 
ership, while our five big nations, democracies or semi- 
democracies, are stretched in a huge ring with pre- 
carious connections on land, with the submarine alert 
on the sea. Much of their territory is occupied. Thej 
did not seek the war; they still lack co-ordination and 
leadership in waging it. In some of these countries, at 
least, politicians and statesmen are so absorbed by ad- 
ministrative duties, by national rather than interna- 
tional problems, by the effort to sustain themselves, that 
they have little time for allied strategy. Governments 
rise and fall, familiar names and reputations are jug- 
gled about like numbered balls in a shaker, come to the 
top to be submerged again in a new emeute. There are 
conferences and conferences without end. Meanwhile a 
social ferment is at work, in Russia conspicuously, in 
Italy a little less so, in Germany and Austria undoubt- 
edly, in France and England, and even in our own 
country — once of the most radical in the world, now 
become the most conservative ! 

What form will the social revolution take ? Will it be 
unbridled, unguided ; will it run through a long period 
of anarchy before the fermentation begun shall have 
been completed, or shall it be handled, in all the nations 
concerned, by leaders who understand and sympathize 
with the evolutionary trend, who are capable of con- 
trolling it, of taking the necessary international steps of 



A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 33 

co-operation in order that it may become secure and 
mutually beneficial to all ? This is an age of co-opera- 
tion, and in this at least, if not in other matters, the 
United States of America is in an ideal position to 
assume the leadership. 

To a certain extent, one is not prepared to say how 
far, the military and social crises are interdependent. 
And undoubtedly the military problem rests on the sup- 
pression of the submarine. If Germany continues to 
destroy shipping on the seas, if we are not able to supply 
our new armies and the Allied nations with food and 
other things, the increasing social ferment will paralyze 
the military operations of the Entente. The result of 
a German victory under such circumstances is impossible 
to predict ; but the chances are certainly not worth run- 
ning. In a sense, therefore, in a great sense, the sit- 
uation is " up " to us in more ways than one, not only 
to supply wise democratic leadership but to contribute 
material aid and brains in suppressing the submarine, 
and to build ships enough to keep Britain, Erance, and 
Italy from starving. We are looked upon by all the 
Allies, and I believe justly, as being a disinterested na- 
tion, free from the age-long jealousies of Europe. And 
we can do much in bringing together and making more 
purposeful the various elements represented by the na- 
tions to whose aid we have come. 

I had not intended in these early papers to comment. 



34 A TEAVELLER IN WAE-TIME 

but to confine myself to such of my experiences abroad 
as might prove interesting and somewhat illuminating. 
So much I cannot refrain from saying. 

II 

It is a pleasure to praise where praise is due, and 
too much cannot be said of the personnel of our naval 
service — something of which I can speak from inti- 
mate personal experience. In these days, in that part 
of London near the Admiralty, you may chance to run 
across a tall, erect, and broad-shouldered man in blue 
uniform with three stars on his collar, striding rapidly 
along the sidewalk, and sometimes, in his haste, cutting 
across a street. People smile at him — costermongers, 
clerks, and shoppers — and whisper among themselves^ 
" There goes the American admiral ! " and he invariably 
smiles back at them, especially at the children. He is 
an admiral, every inch a seaman, commanding a devoted 
loyalty from his staff and from the young men who are 
scouring the seas with our destroyers. In Prance as 
well as in England the name Sims is a household word, 
and if he chose he might be feted every day of the week. 
He does not choose. He spends long hours instead in 
the quarters devoted to his administration in Grosvenor 
Gardens, or in travelling in Prance and Ireland super- 
vising the growing forces under his coramand. 



A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 35 

It may not be out of place to relate a characteristic 
story of Admiral Sims, whose career in our service, 
whose notable contributions to naval gunnery are too 
well known to need repetition. Several years ago, on 
a memorable trip to England, he was designated by the 
admiral of the fleet to be present at a banquet given our 
sailors in the Guildhall. Of course the lord mayor 
called upon him for a speech, but Commander Sims in- 
sisted that a bluejacket should make the address. 
" What, a bluejacket ! " exclaimed the lord mayor in 
astonishment. " Do bluejackets make speeches in your 
country ? " " Certainly they do,'' said Sims. " Now 
there's a fine-looking man over there, a quartermaster 
on my ship. Let's call on him and see what he has 
to say." The quartermaster, duly summoned, rose with 
aplomb and delivered himself of a speech that made the 
hall ring, that formed the subject of a puzzled and 
amazed comment by the newspapers of the British 
Capital. Nor was it ever divulged that Commander 
Sims had foreseen the occasion and had picked out the 
impressive quartermaster to make a reputation for ora- 
tory for the enlisted force. 

As a matter of fact, it is no exaggeration to add that 
there were and are other non-commissioned officers and 
enlisted men in the service who could have acquitted 
themselves equally well. One has only to attend some 
of their theatrical performances to be assured of it. 



36 A TKAVELLEK IN WAK-TIME 

But to the European mind our bluejacket is still some- 
thing of an anomaly. He is a credit to our public 
schools, a fruit of our system of universal education. 
And he belongs to a service in which are reconciled, 
paradoxically, democracy and discipline. One moment 
you may hear a bluejacket talking to an officer as man 
to man, and the next you will see him salute and obey 
an order implicitly. 

On a wet and smoky night I went from the London 
streets into the brightness and warmth of that refuge 
for American soldiers and sailors, the " Eagle Hut," as 
the Y. M. C. A. is called. The place was full, as usual, 
but my glance was at once attracted by three strapping, 
intelligent-looking men in sailor blouses playing pool 
in a corner. " I simply can't get used to the fact that 
people like that are ordinary sailors," said the lady in 
charge to me as we leaned against the soda-fountain. 
" They're a continual pride and delight to us Americans 
here — always so willing to help when there's anything 
to be done, and so interesting to talk to." When I sug- 
gested that her ideas of the navy must have been derived 
from Pinafore she laughed. ^^ I can't imagine using 
a cat-o'-nine-tails on them ! " she exclaimed — and nei- 
ther could I. I heard many similar comments. They 
are indubitably American, these sailors, youngsters with 
the stamp of our environment on their features, keen 
and self-reliant. I am not speaking now only of those 



A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 37 

who have enlisted since the war, but of those others, 
largely from the small towns and villages of our Middle 
West, who in the past dozen years or so have been re- 
cruited by an interesting and scientific system which is 
the result of the genius of our naval recruiting officers. 
In the files at Washington may be seen, carefully tab- 
ulated, the several reasons for their enlisting. Some 
have " friends in the service " ; others wish to " perfect 
themselves in a trade," to " complete their education " 
or " see the world " — our adventurous spirit. And 
they are seeing it. 

They are also engaged in the most exciting and adven- 
turous sport — with the exception of aerial warfare — 
ever devised or developed — that of hunting down in 
all weathers over the wide spaces of the Atlantic those 
modern sea monsters that prey upon the Allied ship- 
ping. Eor the superdreadnouglit is reposing behind 
the nets, the battle-cruiser ignominiously laying mines ; 
and for the present at least, until some wizard shall 
invent a more effective method of annihilation, victory 
over Germany depends primarily on the airplane and 
the destroyer. 

At three o'clock one morning I stood on the crowded 
deck of an Irish mail-boat watching the full moon riding 
over Holyhead Mountain and shimmering on the Irish 
Sea. A few hours later, in the early light, I saw the 
green hills of Killarney against a washed and clearing 



38 A TKAVELLEK IN WAK-TIME 

sky, the mud-flats beside the railway shining like purple 
enamel. All the forenoon, in the train, I travelled 
through a country bathed in translucent colours, a 
country of green pastures dotted over w^ith v^hite sheep, 
of banked hedges and perfect trees, of shadowy blue 
hills in the high distance. It reminded one of nothing 
so much as a stained-glass window depicting some 
delectable land of plenty and peace. And it was Ire- 
land ! When at length I arrived at the station of the 
port for which I was bound, and which the censor does 
not permit me to name, I caught sight of the figure 
of our Admiral on the platform; and the fact that I 
was in Ireland and not in Emmanuel's Land was 
brought home to me by the jolting drive we took on an 
" outside car," the admiral perched precariously over 
one wheel and I over the other. Winding up the hill by 
narrow roads, we reached the gates of the Admiralty 
House. 

The house sits, as it were, in the emperor's seat of 
the amphitheatre of the town, overlooking the panorama 
of a perfect harbour. A ring of emerald hills is broken 
by a little gap to seaward, and in the centre is a min- 
iature emerald isle. The ships lying at anchor seemed 
like children's boats in a pond. To the right, where a 
river empties in, were scattered groups of queer, rakish 
craft, each with four slanting pipes and a tiny flag float- 
ing from her halyards ; a flag — as the binoculars re- 



A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 39 

vealed — of crimson bars and stars on a field of blue. 
These were our American destroyers. And in the midst 
of them, swinging to the tide, were the big " mother 
ships " we have sent over to nurse them when, after 
many days and nights of hazardous work at sea, they 
have brought their flock of transports and merchantmen 
safely to port. This " mothering " by repair-ships — 
which are merely huge machine-shops afloat — this trick 
of keeping destroyers tuned up and constantly ready for 
service has inspired much favourable comment from ouf 
allies in the British service. It is an instance of our 
national adaptability, learned from an experience on 
long coasts where navy-yards are not too handy. Eew 
landsmen understand how delicate an instrument the 
destroyer is. 

A service so hazardous, demanding as it does such 
qualities as the ability to make instantaneous decisions 
and powers of mental and physical endurance, a service 
so irresistibly attractive to the young and adventurous, 
produces a type of ofiicer quite unmistakable. The day 
I arrived in London from France, seeking a character- 
istically English meal, I went to Simpson's in the 
Strand, where I found myself seated by the side of 
two very junior officers of the British navy. It ap- 
peared that they were celebrating what was left of a 
precious leave. At a neighbouring table they spied two 
of our officers, almost equally youthful. " Let's have 



40 A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 

'em over/' suggested one of the Britishers; and they 
were " had " over ; he raised his glass. " Here's how 
— as you say in America ! " he exclaimed. ^^ You 
destroyer chaps are certainly top hole." And then he 
added, with a blush, " I say, I hope you don't think I'm 
cheeking you ! " 

I saw them afloat, I saw them coming ashore in that 
Irish port, these young destroyer captains, after five 
wakeful nights at sea, weather-bitten, clear-eyed, 
trained down to the last ounce. One, with whom I 
had played golf on the "New England hills, carried his 
clubs in his hand and invited me to have a game with 
him. Another, who apologized for not being dressed 
at noon on Sunday — he had made the harbour at 
three that morning ! — was taking his racquet out of 
its case, preparing to spend the afternoon on the hos- 
pitable courts of Admiralty House with a fellow cap- 
tain and two British officers. He was ashamed of 
his late rising, but when it was suggested that some 
sleep was necessary he explained that, on the trip just 
ended, it wasn't only the submarines that kept him 
awake. " Wlien these craft get jumping about in a 
seaway you can't sleep even if you want to." He 
who has had experience with them knows the truth of 
this remark. Incidentally, though he did not mention 
it, this young captain was one of three who had been 
recommended by the British admiral to his govern- 



A TKAVELLER IN WAK-TIME 41 

ment for the Distinguished Service Order. The cap- 
tain's report, which I read, is terse, and needs to be 
visualized. There is simply a statement of the lat- 
itude and longitude, the time of day, the fact that 
the wave of a periscope was sighted at 1,500 yards by 
the quartermaster first class on duty; general quar- 
ters rung, the executive officer signals full speed ahead, 
the commanding officer takes charge and manoeuvres 
for position — and then something happens which the 
censor may be fussy about mentioning. At any rate, 
oil and other things rise to the surface of the sea, 
and the Germans are minus another submarine. The 
chief machinist's mate, however, comes in for special 
mention. It seems that he ignored the ladder and 
literally fell down the hatch, dislocating his shoulder 
but getting the throttle wide open within five seconds ! 
In this town, facing the sea, is a street lined with 
quaint houses painted in yellows and browns and 
greens, and under each house the kind of a shop that 
brings back to the middle-aged delectable memories of 
extreme youth and nickels to spend. Up and down 
that street on a bright Saturday afternoon may be seen 
our Middle-Western jackies chumming with the Brit- 
ish sailors and Tommies, or flirting with the Irish 
girls, or gazing through the little panes of the show- 
windows, whose enterprising proprietors have imported 
from the States a popular brand of chewing-gum to 



42 A TEAVELLER IIST WAE-TIME 

make us feel more at home. In one of these shops, 
where I went to choose a picture post-card, I caught 
sight of an artistic display of a delicacy I had thought 
long obsolete — the everlasting gum-drop. But when 
I produced a shilling the shopkeeper shook his head. 
^' Sure, every day the sailors are wanting to buy them 
off me, but it's for ornament I'm keeping them," he 
said. ^^ There's no more to be had till the war will 
be over. Eight years they're here now, and you 
wouldn't get a tooth in them, sir ! " So I wandered 
out again, joined the admiral, and inspected the Blue- 
jackets' Club by the water's edge. Nothing one sees, 
perhaps, is so eloquent of the change that has taken 
place in the life and fabric of our navy. If you are 
an enlisted man, here in this commodious group of 
buildings you can get a good shore meal and entertain 
your friends among the Allies, you may sleep in a real 
bed, instead of a hammock, you may play pool, or 
see a moving-picture show, or witness a vaudeville 
worthy of professionals, like that recently given in 
honour of the visit of the admiral of our Atlantic 
fleet. A band of thirty pieces furnished the music, 
and in the opinion of the jackies one feature alone was 
lacking to make the entertainment a complete success 
— the new drop-curtain had failed to arrive from 
London. I happened to be present when this curtain 
was first unrolled, and beheld spread out before me a 



A TEAVELLEE lE^ WAE-TIME 43 

most realistic presentation of '' little old 'New York," 
seen from the !N^orth Eiver, towering against blue 
American skies. And though I have never been over- 
fond of ISTew York, that curtain in that place gave me 
a sensation ! 

Such is the life of our officers and sailors in these 
strange times that have descended upon us. Five to 
eight days of vigilance, of hardship and danger — in 
short, of war — and then three days of relaxation and 
enjoyment in clubs, on golf-courses and tennis-courts, 
barring the time it takes to clean ship and paint. There 
need be no fear that the war will be neglected. It is 
eminently safe to declare that our service will be true to 
its traditions. 

Ill 

" Dogged does it '' ought to be added to '^ Dieu et 
mon droit " and other devices of England. On a day 
when I was lunching with Mr. Lloyd George in the 
dining-room at 10 Downing Street that looks out over 
the Horse Guards' Parade, the present premier, with a 
characteristic gesture, flung out his hand toward the 
portrait of a young man in the panel over the mantel. 
It was of the younger Pitt, who had taken his meals 
and drunk his port in this very room in that other great 
war a hundred years ago. The news of Austerlitz, 
brought to him during his illness, is said to have killed 



44 A TKAVELLER IN WAK-TIME 

him. But England, undismayed, fought on for a dec- 
ade, and won. Mr. Lloyd George, in spite of burdens 
even heavier than Pitt's, happily retains his health ; 
and his is the indomitable spirit characteristic of the 
new Britain as well as of the old. Por it is a new 
Britain one sees. Mr. Lloyd George is prime min- 
ister of a transformed Britain, a Britain modernized 
and democratized. Like the Englishman who, when 
he first Avitnessed a performance of "^ Uncle Tom's 
Cabin," cried out, '' How very unlike the home life 
of our dear Queen ! " the American who lunches in 
Downing Street is inclined to exclaim : '' How differ- 
ent from Lord North and Palmerston ! " We have, I 
fear, been too long accustomed to interpret Britain in 
terms of these two ministers and of what they repre- 
sented to us of the rule of a George the Third or of an 
inimical aristocracy. Three out of the five men who 
form the war cabinet of an empire are of w^hat would 
once have been termed an " humble origin." One was, 
if I am not mistaken, born in Nova Scotia. General 
Smuts, unofficially associated wuth this council, not 
many vears as'o was in arms ao'ainst Britain in South 
Africa, and the prime minister himself is the son of a 
Welsh tailor. A situation that should mollify the most 
exacting and implacable of our anti-British democrats ! 
I listened to many speeches and explanations of the 



A TKAVELLER m WAE-TIME 45 

prejudice that existed in the mind of the dyed-in-the- 
wool American against England, and the reason most 
frequently given was the " school-book " reason ; our 
histories kept the feeling alive. l!Tow, there is no doubt 
that the histories out of which we were taught made 
what psychologists would call " action patterns," or 
"complexes," in our brains, just as the school-books 
have made similar complexes in the brains of German 
children and prepared them for this war. But, after 
all, there was a certain animus behind the histories. 
Boiled down, the sentiment was one against the rule 
of a hereditary aristocracy, and our forefathers had 
it long before the separation took place. The Middle- 
Western farmer has no prejudice against Erance, be- 
cause Erance is a republic. The Erench are lovable, 
and worthy of all the sympathy and affection we can 
give them. But Britain is still nominally a monarchy, 
and our patriot thinks of its people very much as the 
cowboy used to regard citizens of New York. They all 
lived on Eifth Avenue. Eor the cowboy, the residents 
of the dreary side streets simply did not exist. We 
have been wont to think of all the British as aristocrats, 
while they have returned the compliment by visualizing 
all Americans as plutocrats — despite the fact that one- 
tenth of our population is said to own nine-tenths of 
all our wealth ! 

But the war will change that, is already changing it. 



46 A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 

Tout coniprendre c'est tout pardonner. We have been 
soaked in the same common law, literature, and tradi- 
tions of liberty — or of chaos, as one likes. Whether 
we all be of British origin or not, it is the mind that 
makes the true patriot; and there is no American so 
dead as not to feel a thrill when he first sets foot on 
British soil. Our school-teachers felt it when they be- 
gan to travel some twenty years ago, and the thousands 
of our soldiers who pass through on their way to France 
are feeling it today, and writing home about it. Our 
soldiers and sailors are being cared for and entertained 
in England just as they would be cared for and enter- 
tained at home. So are their officers. !Not long ago 
one of the finest to^vn houses in London was donated by 
the owner for an American officers' club, the funds were 
raised by contributions from British officers, and the 
club was inaugurated by the King and Queen — and 
Admiral Sims. Hospitality and good-will have gone 
much further than this. Any one who knows London 
will understand the sacredness of those private squares, 
surrounded by proprietary residences, where every tree 
and every blade of grass has been jealously guarded 
from intrusion for a century or more. And of all these 
squares that of St. James's is perhaps the most exclu- 
sive, and yet it is precisely in St. James's there is to be 
built the first of those hotels designed primarily for the 




KING GEORGE AND LLOYD GEORGE IN CONVERSATION WITH 
AN AMERICAN OFFICER 



A TEAVELLER i:^ WAR-TIME 47 

benefit of American officers, where they can get a good 
room for five shillings a night and breakfast at a rea- 
sonable price. One has only to sample the war-time 
prices of certain hostelries to appreciate the value of 
this. 

On the first of four unforgettable days during whicli 
I was a guest behind the British lines in France the 
officer who was my guide stopped the motor in the 
street of an old village, beside a courtyard surrounded 
by ancient barns. 

" There are some of your Americans," he remarked. 

I had recognized them, not by their uniforms but 
by their type. Despite their costumes, which were 
negligible, they were eloquent of college campuses in 
every one of our eight and forty States, lean, thin- 
hipped, alert. The persistent rains had ceased, a 
dazzling sunlight made that beautiful countryside as 
bright as a coloured picture post-card, but a riotous 
cold gale was blowing; yet all wore cotton trousers 
that left their knees as bare as Highlanders^ kilts. 
Above these some had on sweaters, others brown khaki 
tunics, from which I gathered that they belonged to 
the officers' training corps. They were drawn up on 
two lines facing each other with fixed bayonets, a grim 
look on their faces that would certainly have put any 



48 A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 

Hun to flight. Between the files stood an unmistak- 
able Kipling sergeant with a crimson face and a 
bristling little chestnut moustache, talking like a ma- 
chine gun. 

" Now, then, not too lidylike ! — there's a Bosch in 
front of you ! Run 'im through ! Now, then ! " 

The lines surged forward, out went the bayonets, 
first the long thrust and then the short, and then a 
man's gun was seized and by a swift backward twist 
of the arm he was made helpless. 

" Do you feel it ? " asked the officer, as he turned 
to me. I did. '^ Up and down your spine," he added, 
and I nodded. ^^ Those chaps will do," he said. He 
had been through that terrible battle of the Somme, and 
he knew. So had the sergeant. 

Presently came a resting-spell. One of the squad 
approached me, whom I recognized as a young man I 
had met in the Harvard Union. 

" If you write about this," he said, " just tell our 
people that we're going to take that sergeant home with 
us when the war's over. He's too good to lose." 

IV 

It is trite to observe that democracies are organized 
— if, indeed, they are organized at all — not for war 
but for peace. And nowhere is this fact more appar- 
ent than in Britain. Even while the war is in prog- 



A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 49 

ress has that internal democratic process of evolution 
been going on, presaging profound changes in the social 
fabric. And these changes must be dealt with by 
statesmen, must be guided with one hand while the 
war is being prosecuted with the other. The task is 
colossal. In no previous war have the British given 
more striking proof of their inherent quality of dogged- 
ness. Greatness, as Confucius said, does not consist in 
never falling, but in rising every time you fall. The 
British speak with appalling frankness of their blunders. 
They are fighting, indeed, for the privilege of making 
blunders — since out of blunders arise new truths and 
discoveries not contemplated in German philosophy. 
America must now contribute what Britain and 
Prance, with all their energies and resources and deter- 
mination, have hitherto been unable to contribute. It 
must not be men, money, and material alone, but some 
quality that America has had in herself during her 
century and a half of independent self-realization. 
Mr. Chesterton, in writing about the American Rev- 
olution, observes that the real case for the colonists 
is that they felt that they could be something which 
England would not help them to be. It is, in fact, 
the only case for separation. What may be called the 
English tradition of democracy, which we inherit, 
grows through conflicts and differences, through exper- 
iments and failures and successes, toward an intel- 



50 A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 

lectualized unity, — experiments by states, experiments 
by individuals, a widely spread development, and new 
contributions to the whole. 

Democracy has arrived at the stage when it is ceasing 
to be national and selfish. 

It must be said of England, in her treatment of 
her colonies subsequent to our Revolution, that she took 
this greatest of all her national blunders to heart. As a 
result, Canada and Australia and New Zealand have 
sent their sons across the seas to fight for an empire that 
refrains from coercion; while, thanks to the policy of 
the British Liberals — which was the expression of the 
sentiment of the British nation — we have the spec- 
tacle today of a Botha and a Smuts fighting under the 
Union Jack. 

And how about Ireland? England has blundered 
there, and she admits it freely. They exist in Eng- 
laud who cry out for the coercion of Ireland, and who 
at times have almost had their way. But to do this, 
of course, would be a surrender to the German con- 
tentions, an acknowledgment of the wisdom of the 
German methods against which she is protesting with 
all her might. Democracy, apparently, must blunder 
on until that question too, is solved. 



A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 51 



Many of those picturesque features of the older 
England, that stir us by their beauty and by the sense 
of stability and permanence they convey, will no doubt 
disappear or be transformed. I am thinking of the 
great estates, some of which date from Norman times; 
I am thinking of the aristocracy, which we Americans 
repudiated in order to set up a plutocracy instead. 
Let us hope that what is fine in it will be preserved, 
for there is much. By the theory of the British con- 
stitution — that unwritten but very real document — 
in return for honours, emoluments, and titles, the 
burden of government has hitherto been thrown on 
a class. Nor can it be said that they have been un- 
true to their responsibility. That class developed a 
tradition and held fast to it; and they had a foreign 
policy that guided England through centuries of great- 
ness. Democracy too must have a foreign policy, a 
tradition of service; a trained if not hereditary group 
to guide it through troubled waters. Even in an in- 
telligent community there must be leadership. And, 
if the world will no longer tolerate the old theories, a 
tribute may at least be paid to those who from con- 
viction upheld them; who ruled, perhaps in affluence, 
yet were also willing to toil and, if need be, to die for 
the privilege. 



52 A TKAVELLER IN WAE--TIME 

One Saturday afternoon, after watching for a while 
the boys playing fives and football and romping over 
the green lawns at Eton, on my way to the head mas- 
ter's rooms I paused in one of the ancient quads. 
^J eye had been caught by a long column of names 
posted there, printed in heavy black letters. Etona 
non immemora! Every week many new names are 
added to those columns. On the walls of the chapel 
and in other quads and passages may be found tablets 
and inscriptions in memory of those who have died 
for England and the empire in by-gone wars. I am 
told that the proportion of Etonians of killed to 
wounded is greater than that of any other public school 
— which is saying a great deal. They go back across 
the channel and back again until their names appear on 
the last and highest honour list of the school and 
nation. 

In one of the hospitals I visited lay a wounded giant 
who had once been a truckman in a little town in Kent. 
Incidentally, in common with his neighbours, he had 
taken no interest in the war, which had seemed as re- 
mote to him as though he had lived in North Da- 
kota. One day a Zeppelin dropped a bomb on that 
village, whereupon the able-bodied males enlisted to 
a man, and he with them. A subaltern in his com- 
pany was an Eton boy. " We just couldn't think of 
'im as an orficer, sir; in the camps 'e used to play 



A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 53 

witli us like a child. And then we went to Erance. 
And one night when we was wet to the skin and the 
Boschs was droppin' shell all around us we got the 
word. It was him leaped over the top first of all, 
shouting back at us to come on. He tumbled right 
back and died in my arms, 'e did, as I was climbin' up 
after Mm. I shan't ever forget 'im.'' 

As you travel about in these days you become con- 
scious, among the people you meet, of a certain be- 
wilderment. A static w^orld and a static order are 
dissolving; and in England that order was so static 
as to make the present spectacle the more surprising. 
Signs of the disintegration of the old social strata were 
not lacking, indeed, in the earlier years of the twentieth 
century, when labour members and north-country rad- 
icals began to invade parliament; but the cataclysm 
of this war has accelerated the process. In the muddy 
trenches of Flanders and France a new comradeship 
has sprung up between ofiicers and Tommies, while 
time-honoured precedent has been broken by the ne- 
cessity of giving thousands of commissions to men of 
merit who do not belong to the " officer caste." At the 
Haymarket Theatre I saw a fashionable audience 
wildly applaud a play in which the local tailor be- 
comes a major-general and returns home to marry the 
daughter of the lord of a manor whose clothes he used 
to cut before the war. 



54 A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 

" The age of great adventure/' were the words used 
by Mr. H. G. Wells to describe this epoch as we dis- 
cussed it. And a large proportion of the descendants 
of those who have governed England for centuries are 
apparently imbued with the spirit of this adventure, 
even though it may spell the end of their exclusive 
rule. As significant of the social mingling of elements 
which in the past never exchanged ideas or points of 
view I shall describe a week-end party at a large coun- 
try house of Liberal complexion, on the Thames. I 
have reason to believe it fairly typical. The owner of 
this estate holds an important position in the Foreign 
Office, and the hostess has, by her wit and intelligent 
grasp of affairs, made an enviable place for herself. 
On her right, at luncheon on Sunday, was a labour 
leader, the head of one of the most powerful unions 
in Britain, and next him sat a member of one of the 
oldest of England's titled families. The two were on 
terms of Christian names. The group included two 
or three women, a sculptor and an educator, another 
Foreign Office official who has made a reputation since 
the beginning of the war, and finally an employer of 
labour, the chairman of the biggest shipbuilding com- 
pany in England. 

That a company presenting such a variety of inter- 
ests should have been brought together in the frescoed 
dining-room of that particular house is noteworthy. 



A TEAVELLEK IN WAR-TIME 55 

The thing could happen nowhere save in the England 
of today. At first the talk was general, ranging over 
a number of subjects from that of the personality of 
certain politicians to the conduct of the war and the 
disturbing problem raised by the " conscientious objec- 
tor " ; little by little, however, the rest of us became 
silent, to listen to a debate which had begun between 
the labour leader and the ship-builder on the " labour 
question. '^ It is not my purpose here to record what 
they said. Needless to add that they did not wholly 
agree, but they were much nearer to agreement than 
one would have thought possible. What was inter- 
esting was the open-mindedness with which, on both 
sides, the argument was conducted, and the fact that 
it could seriously take place then and there. For the 
subject of it had long been the supreme problem in the 
lives of both these men, their feelings concerning it 
must at times have been tinged with bitterness, yet 
they spoke with courtesy and restraint, and though 
each maintained his contentions he was quick to ac- 
knowledge a point made by the other. As one listened 
one was led to hope that a happier day is perhaps at 
hand when such things as " complexes " and convictions 
will disappear. 

The types of these two were in striking contrast. 
The labour leader was stocky, chestnut-coloured, vital, 
possessing the bulldog quality of the British self-made 



66 A TRAVELLEE IN WAR-TIME 

man combined with a natural wit, sharpened in the 
arena, that often startled the company into an appre- 
ciative laughter. The ship-builder, on the other hand, 
was one of those spare and hard Englishmen whom no 
amount of business cares will induce to neglect the ex- 
ercise of his body, the obligation at all times to keep 
" fit " ; square-rigged, as it were, with a lean face and 
a wide moustache accentuating a square chin. Occa- 
sionally a gleam of humour, a ray of idealism, lighted 
his practical grey eyes. Each of these two had man- 
aged rather marvellously to triumph over early train- 
ing by self -education : the labour leader, who had had 
his first lessons in life from injustices and hard knocks ; 
and the ship-builder, who had overcome the handicap 
of the public-school tradition and of Manchester eco- 
nomics. 

" Yes, titles and fortunes must go," remarked our 
hostess with a smile as she rose from the table and 
led the way out on the sunny, stone-flagged terrace. 
Below us was a wide parterre whose flower-beds, laid 
out by a celebrated landscape-gardener in the days of 
the Stuarts, were filled with vegetables. The day was 
like our "New England Indian summer — though the 
trees were still heavy with leaves — and a gossamer- 
blue veil of haze stained the hills between which the 
shining river ran. If the social revolution, or evolu- 



A TRAVELLEE IN WAR-TIME 57 

tion, takes place, one wonders what will become of this 
long-cherished beauty. 

I venture to dwell upon one more experience of 
that week-end party. The Friday evening of my ar- 
rival I was met at the station, not by a limousine with 
a chauffeur and footman, but by a young woman with 
a taxicab — one of the many reminders that a war 
is going on. London had been reeking in a green- 
yellow fog, but here the mist was white, and through 
it I caught glimpses of the silhouettes of stately trees 
in a park, and presently saw the great house with its 
clock-tower looming up before me. A fire was crack- 
ling in the hall, and before it my hostess was conversing 
amusedly with a well-known sculptor — a sculptor typ- 
ical of these renaissance times, large, full-blooded, with 
vigorous opinions on all sorts of matters. 

" A lecturer is coming down from London to talk to 
the wounded in the amusement-hall of the hospital," 
our hostess informed us. " And you both must come 
and speak too." 

The three of us got into the only motor of which 
the establishment now boasts, a little runabout using 
a minimum of " petrol," and she guided us rap- 
idly by devious roads through the fog until a blur of 
light proclaimed the presence of a building, one of 
some score or more built on the golf-course by the 



58 A TRAVELLEK IN WAE-TIME 

British Government. I have not space here to de- 
scribe that hospital, which is one of the best in Eng- 
land; but it must be observed that its excellence and 
the happiness of its inmates are almost wholly due to 
the efforts of the ladj who now conducted us across the 
stage of the amusement-hall, where all the convalescents 
who could walk or who could be rolled thither in chairs 
were gathered. The lecturer had not arrived. But 
the lady of the manor seated herself at the speaker's 
table, singling out Scotch wits in the audience — for 
whom she was more than a match — while the sculptor 
and I looked on and grinned and resisted her blandish- 
ments to make speeches. When at last the lecturer 
came he sat down informally on the table with one 
foot hanging in the air and grinned, too, at her ban- 
tering but complimentary introduction. It was then 
I discovered for the first time that he was one of 
the best educational experts of that interesting branch 
of the British Government, the Department of Recon- 
struction, whose business it is to teach the convalescents 
the elements of social and political science. This was 
not to be a lecture, he told them, but a debate in which 
every man must take a part. And his first startling 
question was this : 

" Why should Mr. Lloyd George, instead of getting 
^we thousand pounds a year for his services as prime 
minister, receive any more than a conmaon labourer ? " 



A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 59 

The question was a poser. The speaker folded his 
hands and beamed down at them; he seemed fairly to 
radiate benignity. 

" Now we mustn't be afraid of him, just because 
he seems to be intelligent," declared our hostess. This 
sally was greeted with spasmodic laughter. Her eyes 
flitted from bench to bench, yet met nothing save 
averted glances. " Jock ! Where are you, Jock ? 
Why don't you speak up ? — you've never been dovmed 
before." 

More laughter, and craning of necks for the Jocks. 
This appeared to be her generic name for the wits. 
But the Jocks remained obdurately modest. The pro- 
longed silence did not seem in the least painful to the 
lecturer, who thrust his hand in his pocket and con- 
tinued to beam. He had learned how to wait. And 
at last his patience was rewarded. A middle-aged 
soldier with a very serious manner arose hesitatingly, 
with encouraging noises from his comrades. 

" It's not Mr. Lloyd George I'm worrying about, 
sir," he said, '^ all I wants is enough for the missus and 
me. I had trouble to get that before the war." 

Cries of "Hear! Hear!" 

" Why did you have trouble ? " inquired the lecturer 
mildly. 

" The wages was too low." 

'^ And why were the wages too low ? " 



60 A TEAVELLER IIST WAR-TIME 

" YouVe got me there. I hadn't thought." 

" But isn't it jour business as a voter to think ? " 
asked the lecturer. " That's why the government is 
sending me here, to start you to thinking, to remind 
you that it is you soldiers who will have to take charge 
of this country and run it after the war is over. And 
you won't be able to do that unless you think, and 
think straight." 

" We've never been taught to think," was the illu- 
minating reply. 

" And if we do think we've never been educated to 
express ourselves, same as you ! " shouted another man, 
in whom excitement had overcome timidity. 

" I'm here to help you educate yourselves," said the 
lecturer. ^' But first let's hear any ideas you may have 
on the question I asked you." 

There turned out to be plenty of ideas, after all. 
An opinion was ventured that Mr. Lloyd George served 
the nation, not for money but from public spirit ; a con- 
servative insisted that ability should be rewarded and 
rewarded well; whereupon ensued one of the most en- 
lightening discussions, not only as a revelation of intel- 
ligence, but of complexes and obsessions pervading many 
of the minds in whose power lies the ultimate con- 
trol of democracies. One, for instance, declared that 
" if every man went to church proper of a Sunday 
and minded his own business the country would get 



A TKAVELLEE IN WAE-TIME 61 

along well enough." He was evidently of the opinion 
that there was too much thinking and not enough of 
what he would have termed " religion." Gradually 
that audience split up into liberals and conservatives; 
and the liberals noticeably were the younger men who 
had had the advantages of better board schools, who 
had formed fewer complexes and had had less time in 
which to get them set. Of these, a Canadian made a 
plea for the American system of universal education, 
whereupon a combative ^^ stand-patter " declared that 
every man wasn't fit to be educated, that the American 
plan made only for discontent. " Look at them," he 
exdlaimed, " they're never satisfied to stay in their 
places." This provoked laughter, but it was too much 
for the sculptor — and for me. We both broke our 
vows and made speeches in favour of equality and men- 
tal opportunity, while the lecturer looked on and 
smiled. Mr. Lloyd George and his salary were for- 
gotten. By some subtle art of the chairman the de- 
bate had been guided to the very point where he had 
from the first intended to guide it — to the burning 
question of our day — education as the true foundation 
of democracy! Perhaps, after all, this may be our 
American contribution to the world's advance. 

As we walked homeward through the fog I talked to 
him of Professor Dewey's work and its results, while 
he explained to me the methods of the Reconstruction 



62 A TKAVELLER IIST WAE-TIME 

Department. " Out of every audience like that we get 
a group and form a class," he said. ^' They're always 
a bit backward at first, just as they were tonight, but 
they grow very keen. We have a great many classes 
already started, and we see to it that they are provided 
with text-books and teachers. Oh, no, it's not propa- 
ganda," he added, in answer to my query ; " all we do 
is to try to give them facts in such a way as to make 
them able to draw their own conclusions and join any 
political party they choose — just so they join one 
intelligently." 

I must add that before Sunday was over he had 
organized his class and arranged for their future in- 
struction. 



CHAPTEE III 



CHAPTER III 



1 WOULD speak first of a contrast — and yet I have 
come to recognize how impossible it is to convey to 
the dweller in America the difference in atmosphere 
between England and France on the one hand and our 
country on the other. And when I use the word " at- 
mosphere " I mean the mental state of the peoples as 
well as the weather and the aspect of the skies. I have 
referred in another article to the anxious, feverish pros- 
perity one beholds in London and Paris, to that appar- 
ent indifference, despite the presence on the streets of 
crowds of soldiers to the existence of a war of which 
one is ever aware. Yet, along with this, one is ever 
conscious of pressure. The air is heavy; there is a 
corresponding lack of the buoyancy of mind which is 
the normal American condition. Perhaps, if German 
troops occupied I^ew England and New York, our own 
mental barometer might be lower. It is difficult to say. 
At any rate, after an ocean voyage of nine days one's 
spirits rise perceptibly as the ship nears Nantucket; 

and the icy-bright sunlight of New York harbour, the 

65 



66 A TKAYELLER m WAR-TIME 

sight of the buildings aspiring to blue skies restore the 
throbbing optimism which with us is normal; and it 
was with an effort, when I talked to the reporters on 
landing, that I was able to achieve and express the pes- 
simism and darkness out of which I had come. Pes- 
simism is perhaps too strong a word, and takes no ac- 
count of the continued unimpaired morale and deter- 
mination of the greater part of the British and French 
peoples. They expect much from us. Yet the impres- 
sion was instantaneous, when I set forth in the streets 
of Xew York, that we had not fully measured the mag- 
nitude of our task — an impression that has been amply 
confirmed as the weeks have passed. 

The sense of relief I felt was not only the result of 
bright skies and a high barometer, of the palpable self- 
confidence of the pedestrians, of the white bread on the 
table and the knowledge that there was more, but also 
of the ease of accomplishing things. I called for a tele- 
phone number and got it cheerfully and instantly. I 
sent several telegrams, and did not have to wait twenty 
minutes before a wicket while a painstaking official mul- 
tiplied and added and subtracted and paused to talk 
with a friend ; the speed of the express in which I flew 
down-town seemed emblematic of America itself. I 
had been transported, in fact, into another world — my 
world ; and in order to realize again that from which I 
had come I turned to a diary recording a London filled 



A TKAVELLEK IN WAR-TIME 67 

with the sulphur fumes of fog, through which the lamps 
of the taxis and buses shone as yellow blots reflected on 
glistening streets ; or, for some reason a still greater con- 
trast, a blue, blue November Sunday afternoon in Paris, 
the Esplanade of the Invalides black with people — 
sad people — and the Invalides itself all etched in blue, 
as seen through the wide vista from the Seine. 

A few days later, with some children, I went to the 
Hippodrome. And it remained for the Hippodrome, 
of all places, to give me the thrill I had not achieved 
abroad, the thrill I had not experienced since the first 
months of the war. Mr. George Cohan accomplished 
it. The transport with steam up, is ready to leave 
the wharf, the khaki-clad regiment of erect and vigorous 
young Americans marches across the great stage, and the 
audience strains forward and begins to sing, under its 
breath, the words that proclaim, as nothing else perhaps 
proclaims, how America feels. 

" Send the word, send the word over there . . . 
We'll be o-ver, we're coming over, 
And we won't come back till it's o-ver, over there! " 

Is it the prelude of a tragedy ? We have always been 
so successful, we Americans. Are we to fail now? I 
am an American, and I do not believe we are to fail. 
But I am soberer, somehow a different American than 
he who sailed away in August. Shall we learn other 



68 A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 

things than those that have hitherto been contained in 
our philosophy ? 

Of one thing I am convinced. It is the first war of 
the world that is not a miltary war, although miltarj 
genius is demanded, although it is the bloodiest war in 
history. But other qualities are required; men and 
women who are not professional soldiers are fighting in 
it and will aid in victory. The pomp and circumstance 
of other wars are lacking in this, the greatest of all. 
We had the thrills, even in America, three years ago, 
when Britain and France and Canada went in. We 
tingled when we read of the mobilizing of the huge 
armies, of the leave-takings of the soldiers. We bought 
every extra for news of those first battles on Belgian 
soil. And I remember my sensations when in the prov- 
ince of Quebec in the autumn of 1914, looking out of 
the car-window at the troops gathering on the platforms 
who were to go across the seas to fight for the empire 
and liberty. They were singing " Tipperary ! " " Tip- 
perary ! '^ One seldoms hears it now, and the way has 
proved long — longer than we reckoned. And we are 
singing " Over There ! " 

In those first months of the war there was, we were 
told, in England and France a revival of " religion,'' 
and indeed many of the books then written gave evi- 
dence of having been composed in exalted, mystic moods. 
I remember one in particular, called " En Campagne," 



A TRAVELLER m WAR-TIME 69 

by a young French officer. And then, somehow, the 
note of mystic exaltation died away, to be succeeded by a 
period of realism. Read " Le Feu," which is most typi- 
cal, which has sold in numberless editions. Here is a 
picture of that other aspect — the grinmess, the mo- 
notony, and the frequent bestiality of trench life, the 
horror of slaughtering millions of men by highly spe- 
cialized machinery. And yet, as an American, I strike 
inevitably the note of optimism once more. Even now 
the truer spiritual goal is glimpsed through the battle 
clouds, and has been hailed in world-reverberating 
phrases by our American President. Day by day the 
real issue is clearer, while the " religion " it implies 
embraces not one nation, wills not one patriotism, but 
humanity itself. I heard a Frenchwoman who had 
been deeply " religious " in the old sense exclaim : " I 
no longer have any faith in God ; he is on the side of the 
Germans.'' When the war began there were many evi- 
dences of a survival of that faith that God fights for 
nations, interferes in behalf of the " righteous " cause. 
When General Joffre was in America he was asked by 
one of our countrywomen how the battle of the Marne 
was won. " Madame,'' he is reported to have said, " it 
was won by me, by my generals and soldiers." The 
tendency to regard this victory, which we hope saved 
France and the Western humanitarian civilization we 
cherish, as a special interposition of Providence, as a 



70 A TRAVELLER IX WAR-TIAIE 

miracle, has given place to the realization that the battle 
was won by the resourcefulness, science, and coolness of 
the French commander-in-chief. Science preserves ar- 
mies, since killina:, if it has to be done, is now whoUv 
within that realm ; science heals the wounded, transports 
them rapidly to the hospitals, gives the shattered some- 
thing still t^ live for : and, if we are able to abandon the 
sentimental view and look facts in the face — as many 
anointed chaplains in Europe are doing — science not 
only eliminates typhoid but is able to prevent those ter- 
rible diseases that devastate armies and nations. And 
science is no longer confined to the physical but has in- 
vaded the social kingdom, is able to weave a juster fabric 
into the government of peoples. On all sides we are 
beginning to embrace the religion of self-reliance, a 
faith that God is on the side of intelligence — intel- 
ligence with a broader meaning than the Germans have 
given it, for it includes charity. 

n 

It seems \(^ me that I remember, somewhere in the 
realistic novel I have mentioned — ** Le Feu " — read- 
ing of singing soldiers, and an assumption on the part 
of their hearers that such songs are prompted only by a 
devil-may-care lightness of heart which the soldier 
achieves. A shallow psychology (as the author points 
out), especially in these days of trench warfare! The 



A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 71 

soldier sings to hide his real feelings, perhaps to give 
vent to them. I am reminded of all this in connection 
with my trip to the British front. I left London after 
lunch on one of those dreary, grey days to which I have 
referred; the rain had begun to splash angrily against 
the panes of the car windows before we reached the 
coast. At five o'clock the boat pushed off into a black 
channel, whipped by a gale that drove the rain across 
the decks and into every passage and gangway. The 
steamer was literally loaded with human beings, officers 
and men returning from a brief glimpse of home. 
There was nothing of the glory of war in the embark- 
ation, and, to add to the sad and sinister effect of it, each 
man as he came aboard mounted the ladder and chose, 
from a pile on the hatch combing, a sodden life-pre- 
server, which he flung around his shoulders as he went 
in search of a shelter. The saloon below, where we had 
our tea, was lighted indeed, but sealed so tight as to be 
insupportable; and the cabin above, stifling too, was 
dark as a pocket. One stumbled over unseen passengers 
on the lounges, or sitting on kits on the floor. Even the 
steps up which I groped my way to the deck above were 
filled, while on the deck there was standing-room only 
and not much of that. Mai de mer added to the dis- 
comforts of many. At length I found an uncertain 
refuge in a gangway amidships, hedged in between un- 
seen companions ; but even here the rain stung our faces 



72 A TKAVELLEK IN WAR-TIME 

and the spray of an occasional comber drenched our 
feet, while through the gloom of the night only a few 
yards of white water were to be discerned. For three 
hours I stood there, trying to imagine what was in the 
minds of these men with whose bodies I was in such inti- 
mate contact. They were going to a foreign land to 
fight, many of them to die, not in one of those adven- 
turous campaigns of times gone by, but in the wet 
trenches or the hideous No Man's Land between. What 
were the images they summoned up in the darkness ? 
Visions of long-familiar homes and long-familiar 
friends ? And just how were they facing the future ? 
Even as I wondered, voices rose in a song, English 
voices, soldier voices. It was not " Tipperary," the 
song that thrilled us a few years ago. I strove to catch 
the words : 

" I want to go home ! 
I don't want to go back to the trenches no more, 
Where there are bullets and shrapnel galore, 
I want to go home ! '* 

It was sung boisterously, in a defiant tone of mockery 
of the desire it expressed, and thus tremendously gained 
in pathos. They did want to go home — naturally. It 
was sung with the same spirit our men sing " We won't 
come back till it's over, over there ! " The difference is 
that these Britishers have been over there, have seen the 
horrors face to face, have tasted the sweets of home, and 



A TRAVELLEK IN WAE-TIME Y3 

in spite of heartsickness and seasickness are resolved to 
see it through. Such is the morale of the British army. 
I have not the slightest doubt that it will be the morale 
of our own army also, but at present the British are 
holding the fort. Tommy would never give up the war, 
but he has had a realistic taste of it, and his songs reflect 
his experience. Other songs reached my ears each 
night, above the hissing and pounding of the Channel 
seas, but the unseen group returned always to this. One 
thought of Agincourt and Crecy, of Waterloo, of the 
countless journeys across this same stormy strip of 
water the ancestors of these man had made in the past, 
and one wondered whether war were eternal and in- 
evitable, after all. 

And what does Tommy think about it — this war? 
My own limited experience thoroughly indorses Mr. 
Galsworthy's splendid analysis of British-soldier psy- 
chology that appeared in the December North Ameri- 
can, The average man, with native doggedness, is fight- 
ing for the defence of England. The British Govern- 
ment itself, in its reconstruction department for the 
political education of the wounded, has given partial 
denial to the old maxim that it is the soldier's business 
not to think but to obey; and the British army is leav- 
ened with men who read and reflect in the long nights of 
watching in the rain, who are gaining ideas about con- 
ditions in the past and resolutions concerning those of 



74 A TEAVELLEK IN WAU-'J IME 

the future. The very army itself has had a miracle 
happen to it: it has heeii democratized — and with the 
cheerful consent of the class to which formerly the pos- 
session of conmiissions was largely confined. Grad- 
ually, to these soldier-thinkers, as well as to the mass of 
others at home, is unfolding the vision of a new social 
order which is indeed worth fighting for and dying for. 

ill 

At last, our knees cramped and onr feet soaked, we 
saw the lights of the French port dancing across the 
veil of rain, like thistledo\vns of fire, and presently we 
were at rest at a stono quay. As I stood waiting on the 
deck to have my passf)ort vised, I tried to reconstruct 
the features of this little seaport as I had seen it, many 
years lu^fore, on a bright summer's day when I had 
motored from Paris on my way to London. The gay 
line of hotels facing the water was hidden in the dark- 
ness. Suddenly I heard my name called, and I was 
rescued from the group of civilians by a British officer 
who introduced himself as my host. It was after nine 
o'cloc^k, and he had been on the lookout for me since 
half-past seven. The efTect of his welcome at that time 
and place was electrical, and I was further immensely 
cheered by the news he gave me, as we hurried along 
the street, that two friends of mine were here and quite 
hungry, having delayed dinner for my arrival. One of 



A TEAVELLEK IN WATi-TIME 75 

them was a young rnernlxir of Congress who had been 
making exhaustive studies of the situation in Italy, 
Franco and England, and the other one of our best- 
knowu writ(;rs, both bound for London. We sat around 
the table until nearly (ilevc^n, (5xchanging impressions 
and experiences. Th(.'n my oflicer declared that it was 
time to go home. 

" Home '' provtid to bo tlie big chateau which the Brit- 
ish Government has leased for the kindly purpose of 
entertaining siifh American guests as they choose to 
invite. It is known as the; " American Chateau/^ and 
in the early morning }K>urs wa reached it after a long 
drive through the gale. We (grossed a bridge over a 
moat and traversed a huge stone hall to the Gothic draw- 
ing-room. Were, a fire was crackling on the hearth, 
refreshments were laid out, and the major in command 
rose from his book to greet me. Hospitality, witli these 
people, has attained to art, and, though I had come here 
at the invitation of his government, I had the feeling of 
being his personal guest in his own house. Presently he 
led the way up the stone stairs and showed me the room 
I was to occupy. 

I awoke to the sound of the wind whistling through 
the open lattice, and looking down on th(; ruffkid blue 
waters of the moat I saw a great white swan at his morn- 
ing toilet, his f(;athers dazzling in the sun. It was one 
of those rare crisp and sparkling days that remind one 



76 A TEAVELLER i:^r WAB-TIME 

of our American autumn. A green stretch of lawn 
made a vista through the woods. Following the ex- 
ample of the swan, I plunged into the tin tub the orderly 
had placed beside my bed and went down to porridge in 
a glow. Porridge, for the major was Scotch, and had 
taught his French cook to make it as the Scotch make 
it. Then, going out into the hall, from a table on 
which lay a contour map of the battle region, the major 
picked up a hideous mask that seemed to have been 
made for some barbaric revelries. 

" We may not strike any gas," he said, " but it's as 
well to be on the safe side," whereupon he made me 
practise inserting the tube in my mouth, pinching the 
nostrils instantly with the wire-covered nippers. He 
also presented me with a steel helmet. Thus equipped 
for any untoward occurrence, putting on sweaters and 
heavy overcoats, and wrapping ourselves in the fur rugs 
of the waiting automobile, we started off, with the gale 
on our quarter, for the front. 

Picardy, on whose soil has been shed so much English 
blood, never was more beautiful than on that October 
day. The trees were still in full leaf, the fields green, 
though the crops had been gathered, and the crystal air 
gave vivid value to every colour in the landscape. 
From time to time we wound through the cobble-stoned 
streets of historic villages, each having its stone church 
and the bodkin-shaped steeple of blue slate so character- 



A TEAVELLER IN WAE-TIME 77 

istic of that country. And, as though we were still in 
the pastoral times of peace, in the square of one of 
these villages a horse-fair was in progress, blue-smocked 
peasants were trotting chunky ponies over the stones. 
It was like a picture from one of De Maupassant's tales. 
In other villages the shawled women sat knitting behind 
piles of beets and cabbages and apples, their farm-carts 
atilt in the sun. Again and again I tried to grasp the 
fact that the greatest of world wars was being fought 
only a few miles away — and failed. 

We had met, indeed, an occasional officer or orderly, 
huddled in a greatcoat and head against the wind, exer- 
cising those wonderful animals that are the pride of 
the British cavalry and which General Sir Douglas 
Haig, himself a cavalryman, some day hopes to bring 
into service. We had overtaken an artillery train 
rumbling along toward the east, the men laughing and 
joking as they rode, as though they were going to 
manoeuvres. Farther on, as the soldiers along the high- 
roads and in the towns grew more and more numerous, 
they seemed so harmoniously part of the peaceful scene 
that war was as difficult to visualize as ever. Many 
sat about smoking their pipes and playing with the vil- 
lage children, others were in squads going to drill 
or exercise — something the Briton never neglects. 
The amazing thing to a visitor who has seen the trenches 
awash on a typical wet day, who knows that even billet- 



78 A TKAVELLER IJST WAE-TIME 

ing in cold farms and barns behind the lines can scarcely 
be compared to the comforts of home, is how these men 
keep well under the conditions. To say that they are 
well is to understate the fact: the ruddy faces and 
clear eyes and hard muscles — even of those who once 
were pale London clerks — proclaim a triumph for the 
system of hygiene of their army. 

Suddenly we came upon a house with a great round 
hole in its wall, and then upon several in ruins beside 
the village street. Meanwhile, at work under the wind- 
swept trees of the highway, were strange, dark men from 
the uttermost parts of the earth, physiognomies as old 
as the tombs of Pharaoh. It was, indeed, not so much 
the graven red profiles of priests and soldiers that came 
to me at sight of these Egyptians, but the singing fella- 
heen of the water-buckets of the Nile. And here, too, 
shovelling the crushed rock, were East Indians oddly 
clad in European garb, careless of the cold. That sense 
of the vastness of the British Empire, which at times is 
so profound, was mingled now with a knowledge that 
it was fighting for its life, marshalling all its resources 
for Armageddon. 

Saint Eloi is named after the good bishop who ven- 
tured to advise King Dagobert about his costume. And 
the church stands — what is left of it — all alone on 
the greenest of terraces jutting out toward the east; 
and the tower, ruggedly picturesque against the sky, 



A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 79 

resembles that of some crumbled abbey. As a matter of 
fact, it has been a target for German gunners. Dodg- 
ing an army-truck and rounding one of those military- 
traflic policemen one meets at every important carrefour 
we climbed the hill and left the motor among the great 
trees, which arc still fortunately preserved. And we 
stood for a few minutes, gazing over miles and miles of 
devastation. Then, taking the motor once more, we 
passed through wrecked and empty villages until we 
came to the foot of Vimy Ridge. Notre Dame de Lor- 
ette rose against the sky-line to the north. 

Vimy and Notre Dame de Lorette — sweet but ter- 
rible names ! Only a summer had passed since Vimy 
was the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war. 
From a distance the prevailing colour of the steep slope 
is ochre ; it gives the effect of having been scraped bare 
in preparation for some gigantic enterprise. A nearer 
view reveals a flush of green ; nature is already striving 
to heal. From top to bottom it is pockmarked by shells 
and scarred by trenches — trenches every few feet, and 
between them tangled masses of barbed wire still cling- 
ing to the " knife rests " and corkscrew stanchions to 
which it had been strung. The huge shell-holes, reveal- 
ing the chalk subsoil, were half-filled with water. And 
even though the field had been cleaned by those East 
Indians I had seen on the road, and the thousands who 
had died here buried, bits of uniform, shoes, and ac- 



80 A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 

coutrements and shattered rifles were sticking in the 
clay — and once we came across a portion of a bedstead, 
doubtless taken by some officer from a ruined and now 
vanished village to his dugout. Painfully, pausing 
frequently to ponder over these remnants, so eloquent of 
the fury of the struggle, slipping backward at every step 
and despite our care getting tangled in the wire, we 
made our way up the slope. Buttercups and daisies 
were blooming around the edges of the craters. 

As we drew near the crest the major warned me not 
to expose myself. " It isn't because there is much 
chance of our being shot," he explained, " but a matter 
of drawing the German fire upon others." And yet I 
found it hard to believe — despite the evidence at my 
feet — that war existed here. The brightness of the 
day, the emptiness of the place, the silence — save for 
the humming of the gale — denied it. And then, when 
we had cautiously rounded a hummock at the top, my 
steel helmet was blown off — not by a shrapnel, but by 
the wind ! I had neglected to tighten the chin-strap. 

Immediately below us I could make out scars like 
earthquake cracks running across the meadows — the 
front trenches. Both armies were buried like moles in 
these furrows. The country was spread out before us, 
like a map, with occasionally the black contour of a coal 
mound rising against the green, or a deserted shaft-head. 
I was gazing at the famous battle-field of Lens. Vil- 



A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 81 

iages, woods, whose names came back to me as the major 
repeated them, lay like cloud shadows on the sunny 
plain, and the faintest shadow of all, far to the eastward, 
was Lens itself. I marked it by a single white tower. 
And suddenly another white tower, loftier than the first, 
had risen up! But even as I stared its substance 
seemed to change, to dissolve, and the tower was no 
longer to be seen. !N'ot until then did I realize that a 
monster shell had burst beside the trenches in front of 
the city. Occasionally after that there came to my ears 
the muffled report of some hidden gun, and a ball like 
a powder-puff lay lightly on the plain, and vanished. 
But even the presence of these, oddly enough, did not 
rob the landscape of its air of Sunday peace. 

We ate our sandwiches and drank our bottle of white 
wine in a sheltered cut of the road that runs up that 
other ridge which the French gained at such an ap- 
palling price, Notre Dame de Lorette, while the major 
described to me some features of the Lens battle, in 
which he had taken part. I discovered incidentally that 
he had been severely wounded at the Somme. Though 
he had been a soldier all his life, and a good soldier, his 
true passion was painting, and he drew my attention 
to the rare greens and silver-greys of the stones above us, 
steeped in sunlight — all that remained of the little 
church of Notre Dame — more beautiful, more signifi- 
cant, perhaps, as a ruin. It reminded the major of the 



82 A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 

Turners he had admired in his youth. After lunch we 
lingered in the cemetery, where the graves and vaults 
had been harrowed by shells; the trenches ran right 
through them. And here, in this desecrated resting- 
place of the village dead, where the shattered gravestones 
were mingled with barbed wire, death-dealing fragments 
of iron, and rusting stick-bombs that had failed to ex- 
plode, was a wooden cross, on which was rudely written 
the name of Hans Siebert, Mouldering at the foot of 
the cross was a grey woollen German tunic from which 
the buttons had been cut. 

We kept the road to the top, for !N'otre Dame de Lor- 
ette is as steep as Yimy. There we looked upon the 
panorama of the Lens battle-field once more, and started 
down the eastern slope, an apparently smooth expanse 
covered now with prairie grasses, in reality a labyrinth 
of deep ditches, dugouts, and pits ; gruesome remnants 
of the battle lay half -concealed under the grass. We 
walked slowly, making desperate leaps over the trenches, 
sometimes perforce going through them, treading gin- 
gerly on the " duck board " at the bottom. We stumbled 
over stick-bombs and unexploded shells. No plough can 
be put here — the only solution for the land for years 
to come is forest. Just before we gained the road at 
the bottom, where the car was awaiting us, we were 
startled by the sudden flight of a covey of partridges. 

The skies were grey when we reached the banal out- 



A TKAVELLER IN WAH-TIME 83 

skirts of a town where the bourgeoise houses were mod- 
ern, commonplace, save those which had been ennobled 
by ruin. It was Arras, one of those few magic names, 
eloquent with suggestions of mediaeval romance and art, 
intrigue and chivalry; while upon their* significance, 
since the war began, has been superimposed still another, 
no less eloquent but charged with pathos. We halted 
for a moment in the open space before the railroad sta- 
tion, a comparatively new structure of steel and glass, 
designed on geometrical curves, with an uninspiring, 
cheaply ornamented front. It had been, undoubtedly, 
the pride of the little city. Yet finding it here had at 
first something of the eifect of the discovery of an office- 
building — let us say — on the site of the Reims 
Cathedral. Presently, however, its emptiness, its 
silence began to have their effects — these and the rents 
one began to perceive in the roof. For it was still the 
object of the intermittent yet persistent fire of the Ger- 
man artillery. One began to realize that by these 
wounds it had achieved a dignity that transcended the 
mediocre imagination of its provincial designer. A fine 
rain had set in before we found the square, and here in- 
deed one felt a certain desolate satisfaction ; despite the 
wreckage there the spirit of the ancient town still poign- 
antly haunted it. Although the Hotel de Ville, which 
had expressed adequately the longings and aspirations, 
the civic pride of those bygone burghers, was razed to 



84 A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 

the ground, on three sides were still standing the varied 
yet harmonious fagades of Flemish houses made fa- 
miliar by photogTaphs. Of some of these the plaster 
between the carved beams had been shot away, the roofs 
blown off, and the tiny hewn rafters were bared to the 
sky. The place was empty in the gathering gloom of 
the twilight. The gaiety and warmth of the hut erected 
in the Public Gardens which houses the British Officers' 
Club were a relief. 

The experiences of the next day will remain for ever 
in my memory etched, as it were, in sepia. My guide 
was a younger officer who had seen heroic service, and I 
wondered constantly how his delicate frame had survived 
in the trenches the constant hardship of such weather 
as now, warmly wrapped and with the car-curtains 
drawn, we faced. The inevitable, relentless rain of 
that region had set in again, the rain in which our own 
soldiers will have to fight, and the skies were of a dark- 
ness seldom known in America. The countryside was 
no longer smiling. After some two hours of progress we 
came, in that devastated district near the front, to an ex- 
panse where many monsters were clumsily cavorting like 
dinosaurs in primeval slime. At some distance from 
the road others stood apparently tethered in line, await- 
ing their turn for exercise. These were the far-famed 
tanks. Their commander, or chief mahout — as I was 
inclined to call him — was a cheerful young giant of 



A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 85 

colonial origin, who has often driven them serenely 
across 'No Man's Land and into the German trenches. 
He had been expecting us, and led me along a duck 
board over the morass, to where one of these leviathans 
was awaiting us. You crawl through a greasy hole in 
the bottom, and the inside is as full of machinery as 
the turret of the Pennsylvania, and you grope your way 
to the seat in front beside that of the captain and con- 
ductor, looking out through a slot in the armour over a 
waste of water and mud. From here you are sup- 
posed to operate a machine gun. Behind you two me- 
chanics have started the engines with a deafening roar, 
above which are heard the hoarse commands of the 
captain as he grinds in his gears. Then you realize that 
the thing is actually moving, that the bosses on the belt 
have managed to find a grip on the slime — and pres- 
ently you come to the brink of what appears, to your ex- 
aggerated sense of perception, a bottomless chasm, with 
distant steep banks on the farther side that look unat- 
tainable and insurmountable. It is an old German 
trench which the rains have worn and widened. You 
brace yourself, you grip desperately a pair of brass 
handles in front of you, while leviathan hesitates, seems 
to sit up on his haunches, and then gently buries his nose 
in the pasty clay and paws his way upward into the 
field beyond. It was like sitting in a huge rocking- 
chair. That we might have had a bump, and a bone- 



86 A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 

breaking one, I was informed after I had left the scene 
of the adventure. It all depends upon the skill of the' 
driver. The monsters are not as tractable as they seem. 
That field in which the tanks manoeuvre is character- 
istic of the whole of this district of levelled villages and 
vanished woods. Imagine a continuous clay vacant lot 
in one of our Middle Western cities on the rainiest day 
you can recall ; and further imagine, on this limitless lot, 
a network of narrow-gauge tracks and wagon roads, a 
scattering of contractors' shanties, and you will have 
some idea of the daily life and surroundings of one of 
our American engineer regiments, which is running a 
railroad behind the British front. Yet one has only to 
see these men and talk with them to be convinced of the 
truth that human happiness and even human health — 
thanks to modern science — are not dependent upon an 
existence in a Garden of Eden. I do not mean exactly 
that these men would choose to spend the rest of their 
existences in this waste, but they are happy in the con- 
sciousness of a job well done. It was really inspiring to 
encounter here the familiar conductors and brakemen, 
engineers and firemen, who had voluntarily, and for an 
ideal, left their homes in a remote and peaceful republic 
three thousand miles away, to find contentment and a 
new vitality, a wider vision, in the difiicult and danger- 
ous task they were performing. They were frequently 
under fire — when they brought back the wounded or 



A TEAVELLEE m WAE-TIME 87 

fetclied car-loads of munitions to the great guns on the 
ridiculous little trains of flat cars with open-work wheels, 
which they named — with American humour — the 
Federal Express and the Twentieth Century Limited. 
And their officers were equally happy. Their colonel, 
of our regular Army Engineer Corps, was one of those 
broad-shouldered six-footers who, when they walk the 
streets of Paris, compel pedestrians to turn admiringly 
and give one a new pride in the manhood of our nation. 
Hospitably he drew us out of the wind and rain into 
his little hut, and sat us down beside the stove, cheer- 
fully informing us that, only the night before, the gale 
had blown his door in, and his roof had started for the 
German lines. In a neighbouring hut, reached by a 
duck board, we had lunch with him and his officers — 
baked beans and pickles, cakes and maple syrup. The 
American food, the American jokes and voices in that 
environment seemed strange indeed ! But as we smoked 
and chatted about the friends we had in common, about 
political events at home and the changes that were tak- 
ing place there, it seemed as if we were in America 
once more. The English officer listened and smiled in 
sympathy, and he remarked, after our reluctant depar- 
ture, that America was an extraordinary land. 

He directed our chauffeur to Bapaume, across that 
wilderness which the Germans had so wantonly made 
in their retreat to the Hindenburg line. ^Nothing could 



88 A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 

have been more dismal than our slow progress in the 
steady rain, through the deserted streets of this town. 
Home after home had been blasted — their intimate yet 
harrowing interiors were revealed. The shops and 
cafes, which had been thoroughly looted, had their walls 
blown out, but in many cases the signs of the vanished 
and homeless proprietors still hung above the doors. I 
wondered how we should feel in l^ew England if such an 
outrage had been done to Boston, for instance, or little 
Concord ! The church, the great cathedral on its ter- 
race, the bishop's house, all dynamited, all cold and wet 
and filthy ruins ! It was dismal, indeed, but scarcely 
more dismal than that which followed ; for at Bapaume 
we were on the edge of the battle-field of the Somme. 
And I chanced to remember that the name had first been 
indelibly impressed on my consciousness at a comfort- 
able breakfast-table at home, where I sat looking out on 
a bright 'New England garden. In the headlines and 
columns of my morning newspaper I had read again and 
again, during the summer of 1916, of Thiepval and La 
Boisselle, of Fricourt and Mametz and the Bois des 
Trones. Then they had had a sinister but remote sig- 
nificance; now I was to see them, or what was left of 
them! 

As an appropriate and characteristic setting for the 
tragedy which had happened here, the indigo afternoon 
could not have been better chosen. Description fails 



A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 89 

to do justice to the abomination of desolation of that vast 
battle-field in the rain, and the imagination refuses to 
reconstruct the scene of peace — the chateaux and happy 
villages, the forests and pastures, that flourished here so 
brief a time ago. In my fancy the long, low swells of 
land, like those of some dreary sea, were for the mo- 
ment the subsiding waves of the cataclysm that had 
rolled here and extinguished all life. Beside the road 
only the blood-red soil betrayed the sites of powdered 
villages; and through it, in every direction, trenches 
had been cut. Between the trenches the earth was torn 
and tortured, as though some sudden fossilizing proc- 
ess, in its moment of supreme agony, had fixed it thus. 
On the hummocks were graves, graves marked by wooden 
crosses, others by broken rifles thrust in the ground. 
Shattered gun-carriages lay in the ditches, modern can- 
non that had cost priceless hours of skilled labour ; and 
once we were confronted by one of those monsters, 
wounded to the death, I had seen that morning. The 
sight of this huge, helpless thing oddly recalled the emo- 
tions I had felt, as a child, when contemplating dead 
elephants in a battle picture of the army of a Persian 
king. 

Presently, like the peak of some submerged land, we 
saw lifted out of that rolling waste the " Butt " of 
Warlencourt — the burial-mound of this modern Mara- 
thon. It is honeycombed with dugouts in which the 



90 A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 

Germans who clung to it found their graves, while the 
victorious British army swept around it toward Ba- 
paume. Everywhere along that road, which runs like 
an arrow across the battle-field to Albert, were graves. 
Repetition seems the only method of giving an ade- 
quate impression of their numbers; and near what was 
once the village of Pozieres was the biggest grave of all, 
a crater fifty feet deep and a hundred feet across. 
Seven months the British sappers had toiled far below 
in the chalk, digging the passage and chamber ; and one 
summer dawn, like some tropical volcano, it had burst 
directly under the German trench. Long we stood on 
the slippery edge of it, gazing down at the tangled wire 
and litter of battle that strewed the bottom, while the 
rain fell pitilessly. Just such rain, said my officer- 
guide, as had drenched this country through the long 
winter months of preparation. *^ We never got dry," he 
told me ; and added with a smile, in answer to my query : 
" Perhaps that was the reason we never caught colds." 
When we entered Albert, the starting point of the 
British advance, there was just light enough to see the 
statue of the Virgin leaning far above us over the street. 
The church-tower on which it had once stood erect had 
been struck by a German shell, but its steel rod had bent 
and not broken. Local superstition declares that when 
the Virgin of Albert falls the war will be ended. 



., V'' '" 'i - *i 

I if r m ""■ " "• " 




• ■ !i ri n 











.1^1 



^'^^-Sl"^. 



Briluih Pictorial Service. 
THE SQUARE AT ARRAS 




Brilish Pictorial Service. 
THE SQUARE AT ALBERT, SHOWING THE LEANING VIRGIN. 



A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 91 

IV 

I come home impressed with the fact that Britain has 
learned more from this war than any other nation, and 
will probably gain more by that knowledge. We are all 
wanting, of course, to know what we shall get out of it, 
since it was forced upon us ; and of course the only gain 
worth considering — as many of those to whom its com- 
ing has brought home the first glimmerings of social 
science are beginning to see — is precisely a newly ac- 
quired vision of the art of self-government. It has been 
unfortunately necessary — or perhaps fortunately neces- 
sary — for the great democracies to turn their energies 
and resources and the inventive ingenuity of their citi- 
zens to the organization of armies and indeed of entire 
populations to the purpose of killing enough Germans to 
remove democracy's exterior menace. The price we pay 
in human life is appallingly unfortunate. But the 
necessity for national organization socializes the nation 
capable of it ; or, to put the matter more truly, if the so- 
cializing process had anticipated the war — as it had in 
Great Britain — the ability to complete it under stress 
is the test of a democratic nation ; and hence the test of 
democracy, since the socializing process becomes inter- 
national. Britain has stood the test, even from the old- 
fashioned militarist point of view, since it is apparent 
that no democracy can wage a sustained great war un- 



92 A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 

less it is socialized. After the war she will probably 
lead all other countries in a sane and scientific liberal- 
ization. The encouraging fact is that not in spite of her 
liberalism, but because of it, she has met military Ger- 
many on her own ground and, to use a vigorous expres- 
sion^ gone her one better. In 1914, as armies go to- 
day, the British Army was a mere handful of men 
whose officers belonged to a military caste. Brave men 
and brave officers, indeed ! But at present it is a war 
organization of an excellence which the Germans never 
surpassed. I have no space to enter into a description 
of the amazing system, of the network of arteries con- 
verging at the channel ports and spreading out until it 
feeds and clothes every man of those millions, furnishes 
him with newspapers and tobacco, and gives him the 
greatest contentment compatible with the conditions un- 
der which he has to live. The number of shells flung at 
the enemy is only limited by the lives of the guns that 
fire them. I should like to tell with what swiftness, un- 
der the stress of battle, the wounded are hurried back to 
the coast and even to England itself. I may not state 
the thousands carried on leave every dav across the 
channel and back again — in spite of submarines. But 
I went one day through Saint Omer, with its beautiful 
church and little blue chateau, past the rest-camps of the 
big regiments of guards to a seaport on the do^vns, for- 
merly a quiet little French town, transformed now into 



A TKAVKLLKU IN WAK-TIMK Dii 

an iM'ilcrod H.Mbt^l. Tlic (immu Is parndoxicnl, hut, I \cl it 
staiuL lMii;lisli, Irisli, ;mil Scotcli from l\\o l^rilisli 
JsK's :nul i\\c (MuIs o( tlic cartli inlnt;K' IIkm'c with In- 
dians, l\i;vplians, and \\\v chixUvvluiX, Mt)ni;-()lians iu 
(]niHM' tni* c'aps who work in tlio bak(M*ios. 

I wcMil tlii'(nii;h ono o( (licsc^ hak(M'i(\^, almost, as lariz;(^ 
as an antoniohilo facltn-v, frai::rant with tho aroma oi' 
two hnndred Ihonsand K)av(>s ot* hrt^uL This bakerv 
alono S(MuL^ i^imv (hiv to tlio tronclies two Inindrtn] tlion- 
sand loavos ma(h* i'vom {\\c whoat of wostin-n Canada! 
0( all sights \o ho S(Vmi in this [)lac(\ howtnor, tho 
roolaniat ion " plant." is tho most, wondorful. It covers 
aoros. Kvorvthini;' which is brokcMi in war, from a pair 
of otHc'(M''s litdd-i;lass(*s \o a nino-inch howitzer oarriaixo 
is nuMuiod lioro if it can hv mended. Iler(\ when a 
battle-field is cK>are(i, vxt^-y article that can [mssibly be 
"liseci auain is hi-(Mii;ht ; and the manai;'er pointed with 
jn-ide to the t'nrnaces in his {>ow(M--house, wliich formerly 
burncul coal and wow are ftnl with r(>fuse — broken 
W'luH>ls oi' i;nii carriai;('s, sawdnst, and even old shoes. 
Hundreds o\' b'rench i;irls and own C<erman prisoners 
are resiilin^- and [>atehing sboes with tho aid of American 
machincM-y, and t>ven the uppers of sneh as are otherwise 
hopeless are cn( in spirals into laces. Tunics, breeches, 
and overcoats art* mended by tailors; rusty camp cook- 
ers are retinned, and in the foundries the precious scraps 
of cast iron are melted into brazi(u-s to keep Tonnny in 



94 A TRAVELLEK m WAE-TIME 

the trenches wariiL In the machine-shops the injured 
guns and cannon are repaired. German prisoners are 
working there, too. At a distance, in their homely grey 
tunics, with their bullet-shaped heads close-cropped and 
the hairs standing out like the needles of a cylinder of a 
music-box, they had the appearance of hard citizens who 
had become rather sullen convicts. Some wore spec- 
tacles. A closer view revealed that most of them were 
contented, and some actually cheerful. None, indeed, 
seemed more cheerful than a recently captured group 
I saw later, who were actually building the barbed-wire 
fence that was to confine them ! 

My last visit in this town was to the tiny hut on a 
" comer lot," in which the Duchess of Sutherland has 
lived now for some years. As we had tea she told me 
she was going on a fortnight^s leave to England; and 
no Tommy in the trenches could have been more excited 
over the prospect. Her own hospital, which occupies 
the rest of the lot, is one of those marvels which in- 
dividual initiative and a strong social sense such as hers 
has produced in this war. Special enterprise was re- 
quired to save such desperate cases as are made a spe- 
cialty of here, and all that medical and surgical science 
can do has been concentrated, with extraordinary suc- 
cess, on the shattered men who are brought to her wards. 
That most of the horrible fractures I saw are healed, and 
healed quickly — thanks largely to the drainage system 



A TKAVELLER m WAE-TIME 95 

of our own Doctor Carrel — is not the least of the won- 
ders of the remarkable times in which we live. 

The next day, Sunday, I left for Paris, bidding fare- 
well regretfully to the last of my British-officer hosts. 
He seemed like an old, old friend — though I had known 
him but a few days. I can see him now as he waved 
me a good-bye from the platform in his Glengarry cap 
and short tunic and plaid trousers. He is the owner of 
a castle and some seventy square miles of land in Scot- 
land alone. For the comfort of his nation's guests, he 
toils like a hired courier. 



A'N ESSAY ON THE AMEEICAN C0:N'TEIBU- 

tio:n" and the demockatic idea 



AN ESSAY ON THE AMERICA:^' CONTRIBU- 
TION AND THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA 



FAILURE to recognize that the American is at 
heart an idealist is to lack understanding of our 
national character. Two of our greatest interpreters 
proclaimed it, Emerson and William James. In a re- 
cent address at the Paris Sorbonne on *^ American 
Idealism/' M. Eirmin Roz ^ observed that a people is 
rarely justly estimated by its contemporaries. The 
Erench, he says, have been celebrated chiefly for the 
skill of their chefs and their vaudeville actors, while in 
the disturbed speculum mundi Americans have appeared 
as a collection of money grubbers whose philosophy is 
the dollar. It remained for the war to reveal the true 
nature of both peoples. The American colonists, M. 
Roz continues, unlike other colonists, were animated not 
by material motives, but by the desire to safeguard and 
realize an ideal; our inherent characteristic today is a 
belief in the virtue and power of ideas, of a national, 

1 Secretaire de la Section France-Etats Unis due Comity France- 
Amerique. 

99 



100 THE AMERICAN CONTEIBUTION 

indeed, of a universal, mission. In the Eighteenth 
Centurj we proposed a Philosophy and adopted a Con- 
stitution far in advance of the political practice of the 
day, and set up a government of which Europe predicted 
the early downfall. JS'evertheless, thanks partly to good 
fortune, and to the farseeing wisdom of our early states- 
men who perceived that the success of our experiment 
depended upon the maintenance of an isolation from 
European affairs, we established democracy as a prac- 
tical form of government. 

We have not always lived up to our beliefs in ideas. 
In our dealings with other nations, we yielded often to 
imperialistic ambitions and thus, to a certain extent, 
justified the cynicism of Europe. We took what we 
wanted — and more. Erom Spain we seized western 
Elorida; the annexation of Texas and the subsequent 
war with Mexico are acts upon which we cannot look 
back with unmixed democratic pride; while more than 
once we professed a naive willingness to fight England 
in order to push our boundaries further north. We 
regarded the Monroe Doctrine as altruistic, while others 
smiled. But it suited England, and her sea power gave 
it force. 

Our war with Spain in 1898, however, was fought for 
an idea, and, despite the imperialistic impulse that fol- 
lowed it, marks a transition, an advance, in international 
ethics. Imperialistic cynics were not lacking to scoff 



THE AMEKICA:N" C0:N^TRIBUTI0N 101 

at our protestation that we were fighting Spain in order 
to liberate Cuba; and yet this, for the American 
people at large, was undoubtedly the inspiration of the 
war. We kept our promise, we did not annex Cuba, we 
introduced into international affairs what is known as 
the Big Brother idea. Then came the Piatt Amend- 
ment. Cuba was free, but she must not wallow near 
our shores in an unhygienic state, or borrow money 
without our consent. We acquired valuable naval 
bases. Moreover, the sudden and unexpected acquisi- 
tion of Porto Eico and the Philippines made us impe- 
rialists in spite of ourselves. 

Nations as well as individuals, however, must be 
judged by their intentions. The sound public opinion 
of our people has undoubtedly remained in favour of 
ultimate self-government for the Philippines, and the 
greatest measure of self-determination for little Porto 
Rico; it has been unquestionably opposed to commercial 
exploitation of the islands, desirous of yielding to these 
peoples the fruits of their labour in developing the re- 
sources of their own lands. An intention, by the way, 
diametrically different from that of Germany. In re- 
gard to our protectorate in the island of San Domingo, 
our " semi-protectorate " in Nicaragua, the same argu- 
ment of intention may fairly be urged. Germany, who 
desired them, would have exploited them. To a cer- 
tain extent, no doubt, as a result of the momentum of 



102 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 

commercial imperialism, we are still exploiting them. 
But the attitude of the majority of Americans toward 
more backward peoples is not cynical; hence there is 
hope that a democratic solution of the Caribbean and 
Central American problem may be found. And we are 
not ready, as yet, to accept without further experiment 
the dogma that tropical and sub-tropical people will not 
ultimately be able to govern themselves. If this even- 
tually prove to be the case, at least some such experi- 
ment as the new British Labour Party has proposed for 
the Empire may be tried. Our general theory that the 
exploitation of foreign peoples reacts unfavourably on 
the exploiters is undoubtedly sound. 

Nor are the ethics of the manner of our acquisition 
of a part of Panama and the Canal wholly defensible 
from the point of view of international democracy. 
Yet it must be remembered that President Roosevelt 
was dealing with a corrupt, irresponsible, and hostile 
government, and that the Canal had become a necessity 
not only for our own development, but for that of the 
civilization of the world. 

The Spanish War, as has been said, marked a transi- 
tion, a development of the American Idea. In obedi- 
ence to a growing perception that dominion and exploi- 
tation are incompatible with and detrimental to our 
system of government, we fought in good faith to gain 
self-determination for an alien people. The only real 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIOlSr 103 

peril confronting democracy is the arrest of growth. 
Its true conquests are in the realms of ideas, and hence 
it calls for a statesmanship which, while not breaking 
with the past, while taking into account the inherent 
nature of a people, is able to deal creatively with new 
situations — always under the guidance of current 
social science. 

Woodrow Wilson's Mexican policy, being a projection 
of the American Idea to foreign affairs, a step toward 
international democracy, marks the beginning of a new 
era. Though not wholly understood, though opposed by 
a powerful minority of our citizens, it stirred the con- 
sciousness of a national mission to whicli our people are 
invariably ready to respond. Since it was essentially 
experimental, and therefore not lacking in mistakes, 
there was ample opportunity for a criticism that seemed 
at times extremely plausible. The old and tried method 
of dealing with such anarchy as existed across our south- 
ern border was made to seem the safe one; while the 
new, because it was untried, was presented as disastrous. 
In reality, the reverse was the case. 

Mr. Wilson's opponents were, generally speaking, the 
commercial classes in the community, whose environ- 
ment and training led them to demand a foreign policy 
similar to that of other great powers, a financial impe- 
rialism which is the logical counterpart in foreign 
affairs of the commercial exploitation of domestic na- 



104 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 

tional resources and domestic labour. These were the 
classes which combated the growth of democracy at 
home, in national and state politics. Erom their point 
of view — not that of the larger vision — they were 
consistent. On the other hand, the nation grasped the 
fact that to have one brand of democracy at home and 
another for dealing with foreign nations was not only 
illogical but, in the long run, would be suicidal to the 
Republic. And the people at large were committed to 
democratic progress at home. They were struggling 
for it. 

One of the most important issues of the American 
liberal movement early in this century had been that 
for the conservation of what remains of our natural 
resources of coal and metals and oil and timber and 
waterpower for the benefit of all the people, on the 
theory that these are the property of the people. But 
if the natural resources of this country belong to the 
people of the United States, those of Mexico belong to 
the people of Mexico. It makes no difference how 
" lazy," ignorant, and indifferent to their own interests 
the Mexicans at present may be. And even more im- 
portant in these liberal campaigns was the issue of the 
conservation of human resources — men and women and 
children who are forced by necessity to labour. These 
must be protected in health, given economic freedom 
and a just reward for their toil. The American democ- 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 105 

racy, committed to the principle of the conservation of 
domestic natural and human resources, could not with- 
out detriment to itself persist in a foreign policy that 
ignored them. Eor many years our own government 
had permitted the squandering of these resources by 
adventurous capitalists; and gradually, as we became 
a rich industrial nation, these capitalists sought profit- 
able investments for their increasing surplus in foreign 
lands. Their manner of acquiring " concessions " in 
Mexico was quite similar to that by which they had 
seized — because of the indifference and ignorance of 
our own people — our own mines and timber lands 
which our government held in trust. Sometimes these 
American "concessions" have been valid in law — 
though the law itself violated a democratic principle; 
more often corrupt officials winked at violations of the 
law, enabling capitalists to absorb bogus claims. 

The various rulers of Mexico sold to American and 
other foreign capitalists the resources belonging to the 
people of their country, and pocketed, with their fol- 
lowers, the proceeds of the sale. Their control of the 
country rested upon force ; the stability of the Diaz 
rule, for instance, depended upon the " President's " 
ablity to maintain his dictatorship — a precarious guar- 
antee to the titles he had given. Hence the premium 
on revolutions. There was always the incentive to the 
upstart political and military buccaneer to overthrow 



106 THE AMERICAIS' CONTRIBUTIOI^ 

the dictator and gain possession of the spoils, to sell new 
doubtful concessions and levy new tribute on the capi- 
talists holding claims from a former tyrant. 

The foreign capitalists appealed to their governments ; 
commercial imperialism responded by dispatching mili- 
tary forces to protect the lives and " property " of its 
citizens, in some instances going so far as to take pos- 
session of the country. A classic case, as cited by Hob- 
son, is Britain's South African War, in which the blood 
and treasure of the people of the United Kingdom were 
expended because British capitalists had found the 
Boers recalcitrant, bent on retaining their own country 
for themselves. To be sure. South Africa, like Mexico, 
is rich in resources for which advancing civilization con- 
tinually makes demands. And, in the case of Mexico, 
the products of the tropics, such as rubber, are increas- 
ingly necessary to the industrial powers of the temper- 
ate zone. On the other hand, if the exploiting nation 
aspire to self-government, the imperialistic method of 
obtaining these products by the selfish exploitation of 
the natural and human resources of the backward coun- 
tries reacts so powerfully on the growth of democracy at 
home — and hence on the growth of democracy through- 
out the world — as to threaten the very future of civili- 
zation. The British Liberals, when they came into 
power, perceived this, and at once did their best to make 
amends to South Africa by granting her autonomy and 



THE AMEBICAN CONTKIBUTIO]^ 107 

virtual independence, linking her to Britain by the 
silken thread of Anglo-Saxon democratic culture. How 
strong this thread has proved is shown by the action of 
those of Dutch blood in the Dominion during the pres- 
ent war. 

Eventually, if democracy is not to perish from the 
face of the earth, some other than the crude imperial- 
istic method of dealing with backward peoples, of obtain- 
ing for civilization the needed resources of their lands, 
must be inaugurated — a democratic method. And 
this is perhaps the supreme problem of democracy today. 
It demands for its solution a complete reversal of the 
established policy of imperialism, a new theory of inter- 
national relationships, a mutual helpfulness and part- 
nership between nations, even as democracy implies 
co-operation between individual citizens. Therefore 
President Wilson laid down the doctrine that American 
citizens enter Mexico at their own risk ; that they must 
not expect that American blood will be shed or the 
nation's money be expended to protect their lives or the 
" property " they have acquired from Mexican dictators. 
This applies also to the small capitalists, the owners of 
the coffee plantations, as well as to those Americans in 
Mexico who are not capitalists but wage earners. The 
people of Mexico are entitled to try the experiment of 
self-determination. It is an experiment, we frankJy 
acknowledge that fact, a democratic experiment depend- 



108 THE AMERICAN CONTKIBUTIO:Nr 

ent on physical science, social science, and scientific 
education. The other horn of the dilemma, our per- 
sistence in imperialism, is even worse — since by such 
persistence we destroy ourselves. 

A subjective judgment, in accordance with our own 
democratic standards, by the American Government as 
to the methods employed by a Huerta, for instance, is 
indeed demanded ; not on the ground, however, that such 
methods are " good " or ^^ bad " ; but whether they are 
detrimental to Mexican self-determination, and hence 
to the progi'ess of our own democracy. 

II 

If America had started to prepare when Belgium was 
invaded, had entered the war when the Lusitariia was 
sunk, Germany might by now have been defeated, hun- 
dreds of thousands of lives might have been spared. All 
this may be admitted. Yet, looking backward, it is easy 
to read the reason for our hesitancy in our national 
character and traditions. We were pacifists, yes, but 
pacifists of a peculiar kind. One of our greatest Ameri- 
can prophets, William James, knew that there was an 
issue for which we were ready to fight, for which we 
were willing to make the extreme sacrifice, — and that 
issue he defined as " war against war.'' It remained 
for America to make the issue. 

Peoples do not rush to arms unless their national 



THE AMEEICAN C0NTKIBUTI0:N' 109 

existence is threatened. It is what may be called the 
environmental cause that drives nations quickly into 
war. It drove the Entente nations into war, though 
incidentally they were struggling for certain democratic 
institutions, for international justice. But in the case 
of America, the environmental cause was absent. 
Whether or not our national existence was or is actually 
threatened, the average American does not believe that 
it is. He was called upon to abandon his tradition, to 
mingle in a European conflict, to fight for an idea 
alone. Ideas require time to develop, to seize the 
imagination of masses. And it must be remembered 
that in 1914 the great issue had not been defined. Curi- 
ously enough, now that it is defined, it proves to be an 
American issue — a logical and positive projection of 
our Washingtonian tradition and Monroe doctrine. 
These had for their object the preservation and develop- 
ment of democracy, the banishment from the Western 
Hemisphere of European imperialistic conflict and war. 
We are now, with the help of our allies, striving to ban- 
ish these things from the face of the earth. It is un- 
doubtedly the greatest idea for which man has been 
summoned to make the supreme sacrifice. 

Its evolution has been traced. Democracy was the 
issue in the Spanish War, when we fought a weak na- 
tion. We have followed its broader application to 
Mexico, when we were willing to ignore the taunts and 



110 THE AMERICAN CONTEIBUTIOl^ 

insults of another weak nation, even the loss of " pres- 
tige/' for the sake of the larger good. And we have 
now the clue to the President's interpretation of the 
nation's mind during the first three years of the present 
war. We were willing to bear the taunts and insults of 
Germany so long as it appeared that a future world 
peace might best be brought about by the preservation 
of neutrality, by turning the weight of the impartial 
public opinion of our democracy and that of other neu- 
trals against militarism and imperialism. Our na- 
tional aim was ever consistent with the ideal of William 
James, to advance democracy and put an end to the 
evil of war. 

The only sufficient reason for the abandonment of the 
Washingtonian policy is the furtherance of the object 
for which it was inaugurated, the advance of democ- 
racy. And we had established the precedent, with 
Spain and Mexico, that the Republic shall engage in no 
war of imperialistic conquest. We war only in behalf 
of, or in defence of, democracy. 

Before the entrance of America, however, the issues 
of the European War were by no means clear cut along 
democratic lines. What kind of democracy were the 
allies fighting for ? Nowhere and at no time had it been 
defined by any of their statesmen. On the contrary, 
the various allied governments had entered into com- 
pacts for the transference of territory in the event of 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIO:^" 111 

victory; and had even, by the offer of rewards, sought 
to play one small nation against another. This secret 
diplomacy of bargains, of course, was a European herit- 
age, the result of an imperialistic environment which 
the American did not understand, and from which he 
was happily free. Its effect on France is peculiarly 
enlightening. The hostility of European governments, 
due to their fear of her republican institutions, retarded 
her democratic growth, and her history during the reign 
of ISTapoleon III is one of intrigue for aggrandizement 
differing from Bismarck's only in the fact that it was 
unsuccessful. Britain, because she was separated from 
the continent and protected by her fleet, virtually with- 
drew from European affairs in the latter part of the 
nineteenth century, and, as a result, made great strides 
in democracy. The aggressions of Germany forced 
Britain in self-defence into coalitions. Because of her 
power and wealth she became the Entente leader, yet 
her liberal government was compelled to enter into secret 
agreements with certain allied governments in order to 
satisfy what they deemed to be their needs and just 
ambitions. She had honestly sought, before the war, to 
come to terms with Germany, and had even proposed 
gradual disarmament. But, despite the best intentions, 
circumstances and environment, as well as the precari- 
ous situation of her empire, prevented her from liberal- 
izing her foreign relations to conform with the growth 



112 THE AMERICAN COISTTRIBUTIOJS" 

of democracy within the United Kingdom and the 
Dominions. 

Americans felt a profound pity for Belgium. But 
she was not, as Cuba had been, our affair. The great 
majority of our citizens sympathized with the Entente, 
regarded with amazement and disgust the sudden dis- 
closure of the true character of the German militaristic 
government. Yet for the average American the war 
wore the complexion of other European conflicts, was 
one involving a Balance of Power, mysterious and inex- 
plicable. To him the underlying issue was not demo- 
cratic, but imperialistic ; and this was partly because he 
was unable to make a mental connection between a Euro- 
pean war and the brand of democracy he recognized. 
Preaching and propaganda fail unless it can be brought 
home to a people that something dear to their inner- 
most nature is at stake, that the fate of the thing they 
most desire, and are willing to make sacrifices for, hangs 
in the balance. 

During a decade the old political parties, between 
which there was now little more than an artificial align- 
ment, had been breaking up. Americans were absorbed 
in the great liberal movement begun under the leader- 
ship of President Roosevelt, the result of which was to 
transform democracy from a static to a pragmatic and 
evolutionary conception, — in order to meet and correct 
new and unforeseen evils. Political freedom was seen 



THE AMEKICA:N CONTKIBUTIOlSr 113 

to be of little worth unless also accompanied by the ^ 
economic freedom the nation had enjoyed before the 
advent of industrialism. Clerks and farmers, profes- 
sional men and shopkeepers and artisans were ready 
to follow the liberal leaders in states and nation ; intel- 
lectual elements from colleges and universities were en- 
listed. Paralleling the movement, at times mingling 
with it, was the revolt of labour, manifested not only 
in political action, but in strikes and violence. Readily 
accessible books and magazines together with club and 
forum lectures in cities, towns, and villages were rap- 
idly educating the population in social science, and the 
result was a growing independent vote to make politi- 
cians despair. 

Here was an instance of a democratic culture growing 
in isolation, resentful of all external interference. To 
millions of Americans — especially in our middle west- 
ern and western states — bent upon social reforms, the 
European War appeared as an arresting influence. 
American participation meant the triumph of the forces 
of reaction. Colour was lent to this belief because 
the conservative element which had opposed social re- 
forms was loudest in its demand for intervention. The 
wealthy and travelled classes organized preparedness 
parades and distributed propaganda. In short, those 
who had apparently done their utmost to oppose democ- 
racy at home were most insistent that we should embark 



114 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 

upon a war for democracy across the seas. Again, what 
kind of democracy ? Obviously a status quo, commer- 
cially imperialistic democracy, which the awakening 
liberal was bent upon abolishing. 

There is undoubtedly in such an office as the Ameri- 
can presidency some virtue w^hich, in times of crisis, 
inspires in capable men an intellectual and moral 
growth proportional to developing events. Lincoln, our 
most striking example, grew more between 1861 and 
1865 than during all the earlier years of his life. Nor 
is the growth of democratic leaders, when seen through 
the distorted passions of their day, apparently a con- 
sistent thing. Greatness, near at hand, is startlingly 
like inconsistency; it seems at moments to vacillate, to 
turn back upon and deny itself, and thus lays itself 
open to seemingly plausible criticism by politicians and 
time servers and all who cry out for precedent. Yet it 
is an interesting and encouraging fact that the faith of 
democratic peoples goes out, and goes out alone, to 
leaders who — whatever their minor faults and fail- 
ings — do not fear to reverse themselves when occa- 
sion demands ; to enunciate new doctrines, seemingly in 
contradiction to former assertions, to meet new crises. 
When a democratic leader who has given evidence of 
greatness ceases to develop new ideas, he loses the pub- 
lic confidence. He flops back into the ranks of the con- 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 115 

servatives lie formerly opposed, who catch up with him 
only when he ceases to grow. 

In 1916 the majority of the American people elected 
Mr. Wilson in the belief that he would keep them out of 
war. In 1017 he entered the war with the nation be- 
hind him. A recalcitrant Middle West was the first to 
fill its quota of volunteers, and we witnessed the extraor- 
dinary spectacle of the endorsement of conscription. 
What had happened ? A very simple, but a very great 
thing. Mr. Wilson had made the issue of the war a 
democratic issue, an American issue, in harmony with 
our national hopes and traditions. But why could not 
this issue have been announced in 1914 or 1915 ? The 
answer seems to be that peoples, as well as their leaders 
and interpreters, must grow to meet critical situations. 
In 1861 the moral idea of the Civil War was obscured 
and hidden by economic and material interests. The 
Abraham Lincoln who entered the White House in 1861 
was indeed the same man who signed the Emancipation 
Proclamation in 1863; and yet, in a sense, he was not 
the same man ; events and responsibilities had effected a 
profound but logical growth, in his personality. And 
the people of the Union were not ready to endorse 
Emancipation in 1861. In 1863, in the darkest hour of 
the war, the spirit of the North responded to the call, 
and, despite the vilification of the President, was true 



116 THE AMERICAN COXTRIBUTIOIS" 

to him to victory. More significant still, in view of the 
events of today, is what then occurred in England. The 
British Government was unfriendly ; the British people 
as a whole had looked upon our Civil War very much 
in the same light as the American people regarded the 
present war at its inception — which is to say that the 
economic and materialistic issue seemed to overshadow 
the moral one. But when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed 
it to be a war for hiunan freedom, the sentiment of the 
British people changed — of the British people as dis- 
tinct from the governing classes ; and the textile workers 
of the northern counties, whose mills could not get cot- 
ton on account of the blockade, declared their willing- 
ness to suffer and starve if the slaves in America might 
be freed. 

Abraham Lincoln at that time represented the Ameri- 
can people as the British Government did not represent 
the British people. We are concerned today with peo- 
ples rather than governments. 

It remained for an American President to announce 
the moral issue of the present war, and thus to solidify 
behind him, not onlv the liberal mind of America, but 
the liberal elements within the nations of Europe. He 
became the democratic leader of the world. The issue, 
simply stated, is the advancement of democracy and 
peace. They are inseparable. Democracy, for prog- 
ress, demands peace. It had reached a stage, when, in 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 117 

a contracting world, it could no longer advance through 
isolation : its very existence in every country was threat- 
ened, not only by the partisans of reaction from within, 
but by the menace from without of a militaristic and 
imperialistic nation determined to crush it, restore su- 
perimposed authority, and dominate the globe. Democ- 
racy, divided against itself, cannot stand. A league of 
democratic nations, of democratic peoples, has become 
imperative. Hereafter, if democracy wins, self-deter- 
mination, and not imperialistic exploitation, is to be 
the universal rule. It is the extension, on a world 
scale, of Mr. Wilson^s Mexican policy, the application 
of democratic principles to international relationships, 
and marks the inauguration of a new era. We resort 
to force against force, not for dominion, but to make the 
world safe for the idea on which we believe the future 
of civilization depends, the sacred right of self-govern- 
ment. We stand prepared to treat with the German 
people when they are ready to cast off autocracy and 
militarism. Our attitude toward them is precisely our 
attitude toward the Mexican people. We believe, and 
with good reason, that the German system of education 
is authoritative and false, and was more or less delib- 
erately conceived in order to warp the nature and pro- 
duce complexes in the mind of the German people for 
the end of preserving and perpetuating the power of 
the Junkers. We have no quarrel with the duped and 



118 THE AMEKICAISr CONTKIBUTIOiT 

oppressed, but we war against the agents of oppression. 

To the conservative mind such an aspiration appears 
chimerical. But America, youngest of the nations, was 
born when modern science was gathering the momentum 
which since has enabled it to overcome, with a bewilder- 
ing rapidity, many evils previously held by superstition 
to be ineradicable. As a corollary to our democratic 
creed, we accepted the dictum that to human intelligence 
all things are possible. The virtue of this dictum lies 
not in dogma, but in an indomitable attitude of mind 
to which the world owes its every advance in civiliza- 
tion; quixotic, perhaps, but necessary to great accom- 
plishment. In searching for a present-day protagonist, 
no happier example could be found than Mr. Henry 
Ford, who exhibits the characteristic American mixture 
of the practical and the ideal. He introduces into in- 
dustry humanitarian practices that even tend to increase 
the vast fortune which by his own efforts he has accumu- 
lated. He sees that democratic peoples do not desire 
to go to war, he does not believe that war is necessary 
and inevitable, he lays himself open to ridicule by 
financing a Peace Mission. Circumstances force him 
to abandon his project, but he is not for one moment 
discouraged. His intention remains. He throws all 
his energy and wealth into a war to end war, and the 
value of his contribution is inestimable. 

A study of Mr. Ford's mental processes and acts illu- 



THE AMEEICA:N' contribution 119 

minates the true mind of America. In the autumn of 
1916 Mr. Wilson declared that " the people of the 
United States want to be sure what they are fighting 
about, and they want to be sure that they are fighting 
for the things that will bring the world justice and 
peace. Define the elements; let us know that we are 
not fighting for the prevalence of this nation over that, 
for the ambitions of this group of nations as compared 
with the ambitions of that group of nations, let us once 
be convinced that we are called in to a great combina- 
tion for the rights of mankind, and America will unite 
her force and spill her blood for the great things s^^'^ 
has always believed in and followed." 

" America is always ready to fight '^' 
which are American." Even in thf 
mark the anniversary of our 
But let it be remembered ^ 

days of the Civil War A .o- 

claimed the democratic, ideu c oiruggle. 

The Russian Revolution, which we inust seek to under- 
stand and not condemn, the Allied defeats that are its 
consequences, can only make our purpose the firmer to 
put forth all our strength for the building up of a better 
world. The President's masterly series of state pa- 
pers, distributed in all parts of the globe, have indeed 
been so many Proclamations of Emancipation for the 
world's oppressed. Not only powerful nations shall 



120 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 

cease to exploit little nations, but powerful individuals 
shall cease to exploit their fellow men. Henceforth no 
wars for dominion shall be waged, and to this end secret 
treaties shall be abolished. Peoples through their rep- 
resentatives shall make their own treaties. And just as 
democracy insures to the individual the greatest amount 
of self-determination, nations also shall have self-deter- 
mination, in order that each shall be free to make its 
world contribution. All citizens have duties to perform 
toward their fellow citizens ; all democratic nations must 
V interdependent. 

• ^i+h this purpose America has entered the war. 

Dlies that our own household must be swept 

"^^e injustices and inequalities existing 

^•he false standards of worth, the 

nd waste must be purged from 



In fighiji^^ indeed fighting an evil 

Will — evil because it o^eKs to crush the growth of 
individual and national freedom. Its object is to put 
the world back under the thrall of self-constituted au- 
thority. So long as this Will can compel the bodies of 
soldiers to do its bidding, these bodies must be de- 
stroyed. Until the Will behind them is broken, the 
world cannot be free. Junkerism is the final expression 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 121 

of reaction, organized to the highest efficiency. The 
war against the Junkers marks the consummation of a 
long struggle for human liberty in all lands, symbolizes 
the real cleavage dividing the world. As in the French 
Revolution and the wars that followed it, the true sig- 
nificance of this war is social. But today the Russian 
Revolution sounds the keynote. Revolutions tend to 
express the extremes of the philosophies of their times 
— human desires, discontents, and passions that cannot 
be organized. The French Revolution was a struggle 
for political freedom ; the underlying issue of the pres- 
ent war is economic freedom — without which political 
freedom is of no account. It will not, therefore, suffice 
merely to crush the Junkers, and with them militarism 
and autocracy. Unless, as the fruit of this appalling 
bloodshed and suffering, the democracies achieve eco- 
nomic freedom, the war will have been fought in vain. 
More revolutions, wastage and bloodshed will follow, 
the world will be reduced to absolute chaos unless, in 
the more advanced democracies, an intelligent social 
order tending to remove the causes of injustice and dis- 
content can be devised and ready for inauguration. 
This new social order depends, in turn, upon a world 
order of mutually helpful, free peoples, a League of 
Nations. If the world is to be made safe for democ- 
racy, this democratic plan must be ready for the day 



122 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIOJST 

when the German Junker is beaten and peace is de- 
clared. 

The real issue of our time is industrial democracy — 
we must face that fact. And those in America and the 
Entente nations who continue to oppose it will do so 
at their peril. Eortunately, as will be shown, that ele- 
ment of our population which may be designated as do- 
mestic Junkers is capable of being influenced by con- 
temporary currents of thought, is awakening to the real- 
ization of social conditions deplorable and dangerous. 
Prosperity and power had made them blind and arro- 
gant. Their enthusiasm for the war was, however, 
genuine; the sacrifices they are making are changing 
and softening them; but as yet they can scarcely be 
expected, as a class, to rejoice over the revelation — just 
beginning to dawn upon their minds — that victory for 
the Allies spells the end of privilege. Their conception 
of democracy remains archaic, while wealth is inher- 
ently conservative. Those who possess it in America 
have as a rule received an education in terms of an 
obsolete economics, of the thought of an age gone by. 
It is only within the past few years that our colleges 
and universities have begun to teach modern economics, 
social science and psycholog}^ — and this in the face of 
opposition from trustees. Successful business men, as 
a rule, have had neither the time nor the inclination to 
read books which they regard as visionary, as subver- 



THE AMERICAN^ CONTEIBUTION 123 

sive to an order bj which they have profited. And that 
some Americans are fools, and have been dazzled in 
Europe by the glamour of a privilege not attainable at 
home, is a deplorable yet indubitable fact. These have 
little sympathy with democracy; they have even been 
heard to declare that we have no right to dictate to an- 
other nation, even an enemy nation, what form of gov- 
ernment it shall assume. We have no right to demand, 
when peace comes, that the negotiations must be with 
the representatives of the German people. These are 
they who deplore the absence among us of a tradition of 
monarchy, since the American people "should have 
something to look up to." But this state of mind, 
which needs no comment, is comparatively rare, and 
represents an extreme. We are not lacking, however, 
in the type of conservative who, innocent of a knowl- 
edge of psychology, insists that '' human nature cannot 
be changed,'' and that the " survival of the fittest " is the 
law of life, yet these would deny Darwin if he were a 
contemporary. They reject the idea that society can 
be organized by intelligence, and war ended by eliminat- 
ing its causes from the social order. On the contrary 
they cling to the orthodox contention that war is a neces- 
sary and salutary thing, and proclaim that the American 
fibre was growing weak and flabby from luxury and 
peace, curiously ignoring the fact that their own eco- 
nomic class, — the small percentage of our population 



1-24: THE AMERICAX COXTRIBFTIOX 

owning sixty per cent, of the wealth of the country, and 
^Yhioh therefore should be most debilitated by luxury, 
was most eager for war, aud since war has been declared 
has most amply proved its oouragv and fighting quality. 
This, however, and other evidences of the patriotic sac- 
rifices of those of our oountrymen who possess wealth, 
prove that they are still Americans, and encourages the 
hope and belief that as .Vmericans they ultimately will 
do their share toward a democratic solution of tlio prob- 
lem of society. Alany of them are capable of vision, 
and are beginning to see the light today. 

In America we succeeded in eliminating hereditary 
power, in obtaining a large measure of political liberty, 
only to see the rise of an economic power, and the con- 
sequent loss of economic liberty. The industrial devel- 
opment of the United States was of course a necessary 
and desirable thing, but the economic doctrine which 
formed the basis of Aiuoricau institutions proved to be 
unsuited to industrialism, and introduced unforeseen 
evils that were a serious menace to the Kepublic. An 
individualistic ecoiiomic philosophy worked admirably 
while there was ample land for the pioneer, equality of 
opportunity to satisfy the individual initiative of the 
enterprising. But what is known as industrialism 
brought in its train fear and favour, privilege and pov- 
ertv, slums, disease, and municipal vice, fostered a too 
rapid immigi-ation, established in jVinerica a tenant sys- 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION^ 125 

tern alien to our traditions. The conditions which ex- 
isted before the advent of industrialism are admirably 
pictured, for instance, in the autobiography of Mr. 
Charles Francis Adams, when he describes his native 
town of Quincy in the first half of the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury. In those early communities, poverty was negli- 
gible, there was no great contrast between rich and poor ; 
the artisan, the farmer, the well-to-do merchant met on 
terms of mutual self-respect, as man to man ; economic 
class consciousness was non-existent; education was so 
widespread that European travellers wonderingly com- 
mented on the fact that we had no " peasantry '' ; and 
with few exceptions every citizen owned a piece of land 
and a home. Property, a refuge a man may call his 
own, and on which he may express his individuality, is 
essential to happiness and self-respect. Today, less 
than two thirds of our farmers own their land, while 
vast numbers of our working men and women possess 
nothing but the labour of their hands. The designation 
of labour as " property '' by our courts only served to 
tighten the bonds, by obstructing for a time the move- 
ment to decrease the tedious and debilitating hours of 
contact of the human organism with the machine, — a 
menace to the future of the race, especially in the case 
of women and children. If labour is " property,^' 
wretches driven by economic necessity have indeed only 
the choice of a change of masters. In addition to the 



126 THE america:n^ COIsTTEIBUTION 

manual workers, an army of clerical workers of both 
sexes likewise became tenants, and dependents who knew 
not the satisfaction of a real home. 

Such conditions gradually brought about a pro- 
found discontent, a grouping of classes. Among the 
comparatively prosperous there was set up a social 
competition in luxury that was the bane of large and 
small communities. Skilled labour banded itself into 
unions, employers organized to oppose them, and the 
result was a class conflict never contemplated by the 
founders of the Republic, repugnant to democracy — 
which by its very nature depends for its existence on 
the elimination of classes. In addition to this, owing 
to the unprecedented immigration of ignorant Euro- 
peans to supply the labour demand, we acquired a sinis- 
ter proletariat of unskilled economic slaves. Before the 
war labour discovered its strength ; since the war began, 
especially in the allied nations with quasi-democratic 
institutions, it is aware of its power to exert a leverage 
capable of paralyzing industry for a period sufficient to 
destroy the chances of victory. The probability of the 
occurrence of such a calamity depends wholly on whether 
or not the workman can be convinced that it is his war, 
for he will not exert himself to perpetuate a social order 
in which he has lost faith, even though he now obtains 
a considerable increase in wages. Agreements entered 
into with the government by union leaders will not hold 



THE AMERICA:^ CO]^TRIBUTION 127 

him if at any time he fails to be satisfied that the present 
world conflict will not result in a greater social justice. 
This fact has been demonstrated by what is known as 
the ^' shop steward " movement in England, where the 
workers repudiated the leaders' agreements and every- 
where organized local strikes. And in America, the un- 
skilled workers are largely outside of the unions. 

The workman has a natural and laudable desire to 
share more fully in the good things of life. And it is 
coming to be recognized that material prosperity, up to 
a certain point, is the foundation of mental and spiritual 
welfare: clean and comfortable surroundings, beauty, 
rational amusements, opportunity for a rational satis- 
faction of the human instincts are essential to content- 
ment and progress. The individual, of course, must be 
enlightened; and local labour unions, recognizing this, 
are spending considerable sums all over the country on 
schools to educate their members. If a workman is a 
profiteer, he is more to be excused than the business 
profiteer, against whom his anger is directed ; if he is a 
spendthrift, prodigality is a natural consequence of 
rapid acquisition. We have been a nation of spend- 
thrifts. 

A failure to grasp the psychology of the worker in- 
volves disastrous consequences. A discussion as to 
whether or not his attitude is unpatriotic and selfish is 
futile. No more profound mistake could be made than 



128 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 

to attribute to any element of the population motives 
wholly base. Human nature is neither all black nor 
all white, yet is capable of supreme sacrifices when ade- 
quately appealed to. What we must get into our minds 
is the fact that a social order that insured a large meas- 
ure of democracy in the early days of the Republic 
is inadequate to meet modern industrial conditions. 
Higher wages, material prosperity alone will not suf- 
fice to satisfy aspirations for a fuller self-realization, 
once the method by which these aspirations can be 
gained is glimpsed. For it cannot be too often repeated 
that the unquenchable conflicts are those waged for 
ideas and not dollars. These are tinged with religious 
emotion. 

IV 

Mr. Wilson's messages to the American people and 
to the world have proclaimed a new international order, 
a League of Democracies. And in a recent letter to 
New Jersey Democrats we find him warning his party, 
or more properly the nation, of the domestic social 
changes necessarily flowing from his international pro- 
gram. While rightly resolved to prosecute the war on 
the battle lines to the utmost limit of American re- 
sources, he points out that the true significance of the 
conflict lies in " revolutionary change." " Economic 
and social forces," he says, " are being released upon 



THE AMEKICAN CONTEIBUTIOlSr 129 

the world, whose effect no political seer dare to con- 
jecture." And we " must search our hearts through 
and through and make them ready for the birth of a 
new day — a day we hope and believe of greater oppor- 
tunity and greater prosperity for the average mass of 
struggling men and women.'' He recognizes that the 
next great step in the development of democracy — 
which the war must bring about — is the emancipation 
of labour; to use his own phrase, the redemption of 
masses of men and women from " economic serfdom." 
" The old party slogans," he declares, " will mean noth- 
ing to the future." 

Judging from this announcement, the President seems 
prepared to condemn boldly all the rotten timbers of 
the social structure that have outlived their usefulness 
— a position that hitherto no responsible politician has 
dared to take. Politicians, on the contrary, have re- 
vered the dead wood, have sought to shore the old tim- 
bers for their own purposes. But so far as any party 
is concerned, Mr. Wilson stands alone. Both of the 
two great parties, the Republican and the Democratic, 
in order to make a show of keeping abreast of the times, 
have merely patched their plajtforms with the new ideas. 
The Socialist Party in the United States is relatively 
small, is divided against itself, and has given no evi- 
dence of a leadership of broad sanity and vision. It 
is fortunate we have been spared in this country the 



130 THE AMEEICAN C0]N"TEIBUTI0:N' 

formation of a political labour party, because such a 
party would have been composed of manual workers 
alone, and hence would have tended further to develop 
economic class consciousness, to crystallize class antag- 
onisms. Today, however, neither the Republican nor 
the Democratic party represents the great issue of the 
times; the cleavage between them is wholly artificial. 
The formation of a Liberal Party, with a platform 
avowedly based on modern social science, has become 
essential. Such a party, to be in harmony with our 
traditions and our creed, to arrest in our democracy the 
process of class stratification which threatens to destroy 
it, must not draw its members from the ranks of manual 
labour alone, but from all elements of our population. 
It should contain all the liberal professions, and clerks 
and shopkeepers, as well as manual workers; adminis- 
trators, and even those employers who have become con- 
vinced that our present economic system does not sufiice 
to meet the needs of the day. In short, membership in 
such a party, as far as possible, should not be based 
upon occupation or economic status, but on an honest 
difference of view from that of the conservative oppo- 
sition. This would be a distinctly American solution. 
In order to form such a party a campaign of education 
will be necessary. For today Mr. Wilson's strength is 
derived from the independent vote representing the 
faith of the people as a whole; but the majority of those 



THE AMERICAN C0:^TRIBUTI01T 131 

who support the President, while they ardently desire 
the abolition in the world of absolute monarchy, of 
militarism and commercial imperialism, while they are 
anxious that this war shall expedite and not retard the 
social reforms in which they are interested, have as yet 
but a vague conception of the social order which these 
reforms imply. 

It marks a signal advance in democracy when liberal 
opinion in any nation turns for guidance and support 
to a statesman of another nation. No clearer sign of 
the times could be desired than the fact that our Amer- 
ican President has suddenly become the liberal leader 
of the world. The traveller in France, and especially 
in Britain, meets on all sides striking evidence of this. 
In these countries, until America's entrance into the 
war, liberals had grown more and more dissatisfied 
with the failure of their governments to define in demo- 
cratic terms the issue of the conflict, had resented the 
secret inter-allied compacts, savouring of imperialism 
and containing the germs of future war. They are now 
looking across the Atlantic for leadership. In Prance 
M. Albert Thomas declared that Woodrow Wilson had 
given voice to the aspirations of his party, while a prom- 
inent Liberal in England announced in a speech that it 
had remained for the American President to express the 
will and purpose of the British people. The new Brit- 
ish Labour Party and the Inter- Allied Labour and So- 



132 THE AMERICAN^ C0:N'TRIBUTI0N 

cialist Conferences have adopted Mr. Wilson's program 
and have made use of his striking phrases. But we 
have between America and Britain this difference: in 
America the President stands virtually alone, without 
a party behind him representing his views; in Britain 
the general democratic will of the nation is now being 
organized, but has obtained as yet no spokesman in the 
government. 

Extraordinary sjTuptomatic phenomena have oc- 
curred in Russia as well as in Britain. In Russia the 
rebellion of an awakening people against an age-long 
tyranny has almost at once leaped to the issue of the 
day, taken on the complexion of a struggle for industrial 
democracy. Whether the Germans shall be able to ex- 
ploit the country, bring about a reaction and restore 
for a time monarchical institutions depends largely upon 
the fortunes of the war. In Russia there is revolution, 
with concomitant chaos ; but in Britain there is evolu- 
tion, an orderly attempt of a people long accustomed 
to progress in self-government to establish a new social 
order, peacefully and scientifically, and in accordance 
with a traditional political procedure. 

The recent development of the British Labour Party, 
although of deep significance to Americans, has taken 
place almost without comment in this country. It was 
formally established in 1900, and was then composed 
of manual workers alone. In 1906, out of 50 candi- 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 133 

dates at the polls, 39 were elected to Parliament; in 
1910, 42 were elected. The Parliamentary Labour 
Party, so called, has now been amalgamated with four 
and a half millions of Trade Unionists, and with the 
three and a half millions of members of the Co-operative 
Wholesale Society and the Co-operative Union. Al- 
lowing for duplication of membership, these three or- 
ganizations — according to Mr. Sidney Webb — prob- 
ably include two fifths of the population of the United 
Kingdom. " So great an aggregation of working class 
organizations,'' he says, " has never come shoulder to 
shoulder in any country." Other smaller societies and 
organizations are likewise embraced, including the So- 
cialists. And now that the suffrage has been extended, 
provision is made for the inclusion of women. The new 
party is organizing in from three to four hundred con- 
stituencies, and at the next general election is not un- 
likely to gain control of the political balance of power. 
With the majority of Americans, however, the word 
" labour '' as designating a party arouses suspicion and 
distrust. By nature and tradition we are inclined to 
deplore and oppose any tendency toward the stratifica- 
tion of class antagonisms — the result of industrial dis- 
content — into political groups. The British tradition 
is likewise hostile to such a tendency. But in Britain 
the industrial ferment has gone much further than with 
us, and such a result was inevitable. By taking advan- 



134 THE ameeica:^ co:n'tkibution 

tage of the British experience, of the closer ties now 
being knit between the two democracies, we may in 
America be spared a stage which in Britain was neces- 
sary. Indeed, the program of the new British Labour 
Party seems to point to a distinctly American solution, 
one in harmony with the steady growth of Anglo-Saxon 
democracy. For it is now announced that the word 
" labour/' as applied to the new party, does not mean 
manual labour alone, but also mental labour. The Brit- 
ish unions have gradually developed and placed in 
power leaders educated in social science, who have now 
come into touch with the intellectual leaders of the 
United Kingdom, with the sociologists, economists, and 
social scientists. The surprising and encouraging re- 
sult of such association is the announcement that the 
new Labour Party is today publicly thrown open to all 
workers, both by hand and by brain, with the object of 
securing for these the full fruits of their industry. This 
means the inclusion of physicians, professors, writers, 
architects, engineers, and inventors, of lawyers who no 
longer regard their profession as a bulwark of the status 
quo; of clerks, of administrators of the type evolved by 
the war, who indeed have gained their skill under the 
old order but who now in a social spirit are dedicating 
their gifts to the common weal, organizing and direct- 
ing vast enterprises for their governments. In short, 
all useful citizens who make worthy contributions — as 



THE AMEEICA¥ COINTRIBUTIOiN' 135 

distinguished from parasites, profiteers, and drones, — 
are invited to be members ; there is no class distinction 
here. The fortunes of such a party are, of course, de- 
pendent upon the military success of the allied armies 
and navies. But it has defined the kind of democracy 
the Allies are fighting for, and thus has brought about 
an unqualified endorsement of the war by those ele- 
ments of the population which hitherto have felt the 
issue to be imperialistic and vague rather than demo- 
cratic and clear cut. President Wilson's international 
program is approved of and elaborated. 

The Report on Reconstruction of the new British 
Labour Party is perhaps the most important political 
document presented to the world since the Declaration 
of Independence. And like the Declaration, it is writ- 
ten in the pure English that alone gives the high emo- 
tional quality of sincerity. The phrases in which it 
tersely describes its objects are admirable. " What is 
to be reconstructed after the war is over is not this or 
that government department, this or that piece of social 
machinery, but Society itself." There is to be a sys- 
tematic approach towards a '' healthy equality of ma- 
terial circumstance for every person born into the world, 
and not an enforced dominion over subject nations, 
subject colonies, subject classes, or a subject sex." In 
industry as well as in government the social order is 
to be based " on that equal freedom, that general con- 



136 THE AMERICA:N' CONTRIBUTIOIsr 

scioiisness of consent, and that widest participation in 
power, both economic and political, which is charac- 
teristic of democracy." But all this, it should be noted, 
is not to be achieved in a year or two of " feverish re- 
construction '' ; ^' each brick that the Labour Party helps 
to lay shall go to erect the structure it intends and no 
other." 

In considering the main features of this program, 
one must have in mind whether these are a logical pro- 
jection and continuation of the Anglo-Saxon democratic 
tradition, or whether they constitute an absolute break 
with that tradition. The only valid reason for the 
adoption of such a progi'am in America would be, of 
course, the restoration of some such equality of oppor- 
tunity and economic freedom as existed in our Republic 
before we became an industrial nation. ^^ The first con- 
dition of democracy," — to quote again from the pro- 
gram, " is effective personal freedom." 

What is called the " Universal Enforcement of the 
[N'ational Minimum " contemplates the extension of laws 
already on the statute books in order to prevent the 
extreme degradation of the standard of life brought 
about by the old economic system under industrialism. 
A living minimum wage is to be established. The Brit- 
ish Labour Party intends " to secure to every member 
of the community, in good times and bad alike ... all 
the requisites of healthy life and worthy citizenship." 



THE AMERICA:^' CONTRIBUTION 137 

After the war there is to be no cheap labour market, 
nor are the millions of workers and soldiers to fall into 
the clutches of charity; but it shall be a national obli- 
gation to provide each of these with work according to 
his ca|)acitj. In order to maintain the demand for la- 
bour at a uniform level, the government is to provide 
public works. The population is to be rehoused in 
suitable dwellings, both in rural districts and town 
slums ; new and more adequate schools and training col- 
leges are to be inaugurated ; land is to be reclaimed and 
afforested, and gradually brought under common owner- 
ship; railways and canals are to be reorganized and 
nationalized, mines and electric power systems. One 
of the significant proposals under this head is that which 
demands the retention of the centralization of the pur- 
chase of raw materials brought about by the war. 

In order to accomplish these objects there must be 
a " Revolution in National Einance." The present 
method of raising funds is denounced ; and it is pointed 
out that only one quarter of the colossal expenditure 
made necessary by the war has been raised by taxation, 
and that the three quarters borrowed at onerous rates is 
sure to be a burden on the nation's future. The cap- 
ital needed, when peace comes, to ensure a happy and 
contented democracy must be procured without en- 
croaching on the minimum standard of life, and with- 
out hampering production. Indirect taxation must 



138 THE AMERICAN C0:N"TRIBUTI0:N' 

therefore be concentrated on those luxuries of which it 
is desirable that the consumption be discouraged. The 
steadily rising unearned increment of urban and min- 
eral land ought, by appropriate direct taxation, to be 
brought into the public exchequer ; " the definite teach- 
ings of economic science are no longer to be disre- 
garded." Hence incomes are to be taxed above the 
necessary cost of family maintenance, private fortunes 
during life and at death; while a special capital levy 
must be made to pay off a substantial portion of the 
national debt. 

" The Democratic Control of Industry '' contem- 
plates the progressive elimination of the private cap- 
italist and the setting free of all who work by hand and 
brain for the welfare of all. 

The Surplus Wealth is to be expended for the Com- 
mon Good. That which Carlyle designates as the " in- 
ward spiritual/' in contrast to the " outward econom- 
ical/' is also to be provided for. " Society/' says the 
document, " like the individual, does not live by bread 
alone, does not exist only for perpetual wealth produc- 
tion." Eirst of all, there is to be education according 
to the highest modern standard ; and along with educa- 
tion, the protection and advancement of the public 
health, meiis sana in corpore sano. While large sums 
must be set aside, not only for original research in 
every branch of knowledge, but for the promotion of 



THE AMERICA]^ C0NTRIBUTI0:N' 139 

music, literature, and fine art, upon which " any real 
development of civilization fundamentally depends." 

In regard to the British Empire, the Labour Party 
urges self-government for any people, whatever its col- 
our, proving itself capable, and the right of that peo- 
ple to the proceeds of its own toil upon the resources 
of its territory. An unequivocal stand is taken for the 
establishment, as a part of the treaty of peace, of a 
Universal Society of Nations ; and recognizing that the 
future progress of democracy depends upon co-opera- 
tion and fellowship between liberals of all countries, 
the maintenance of intimate relationships is advocated 
with liberals oversea. 

Einally, a scientific investigation of each succeed- 
ing problem in government is insisted upon, and a much 
more rapid dissemination among the people of the sci- 
ence that exists. " A plutocratic party may choose to 
ignore science, but no labour party can hope to main- 
tain its position unless its proposals are, in fact, the 
outcome of the best political science of its time." 



There are, it will be seen, some elements in the pro- 
gram of the new British Labour Party apparently at 
variance with American and English institutions, tra- 
ditions, and ideas. We are left in doubt, for instance. 



140 THE AMERICAI^ CONTRIBUTION^ 

in regard to its attitude toward private property. The 
instinct for property is probably innate in humanity, 
and American conservatism in this regard is, accord- 
ing to certain modern economists, undoubtedly sound. 
A man should be permitted to acquire at least as much 
property as is required for the expression of his per- 
sonality ; such a wise limitation, also, would abolish 
the evil known as absentee ownership. Again, there 
will arise in many minds the question whether the funds 
for the plan of National finance outlined in the pro- 
gram may be obtained without seriously deranging the 
economic system of the nation and of the world. The 
older school denounces the program as Utopian. On 
the other hand, economists of the modern school who 
have been consulted have declared it practical. It is 
certain that before the war began it would not have 
been thought possible to raise the billions which in four 
years have been expended on sheer destruction; and 
one of our saddest reflections today must be of regret 
that a small portion of these billions which have gone 
to waste could not have been expended for the very pur- 
poses outlined — education, public health, the advance- 
ment of science and art, public buildings, roads and 
parks, and the proper housing of populations! It is 
also dawning upon us, as a result of new practices 
brought about by the war, that our organization of in- 
dustry was happy-go-lucky, ineflScient «nd wasteful, and 



THE AMERICAIs^ CONTRIBUTION 141 

that a more scientific and economical organization is 
imperative. Under such a new system it may well be, 
as modern economists claim, that we shall have an 
ample surplus for the Common Good. 

The chief objection to a National or Democratic Con- 
trol of Industry has been that it would tend to create 
vast political machines and thus give the politicians 
in office a nefarious power. It is not intended here to 
attempt a refutation of this contention. The remedy 
lies in a changed attitude of the employe and the citi- 
zen toward government, and the fact that such an atti- 
tude is now developing is not subject to absolute proof. 
It may be said, however, that no greater menace to 
democracy could have arisen than the one we seem 
barely to have escaped — the control of politics and 
government by the capitalistic interests of the nation. 
What seems very clear is that an evolutionary drift to- 
ward the national control of industry has for many 
years been going on, and that the war has tremendously 
speeded up the tendency. Government has stepped in 
to protect the consumer of necessities from the profiteer, 
and is beginning to set a limit upon profits; has regu- 
lated exports and imports; established a national ship- 
ping corporation and merchant marine, and entered into 
other industries ; it has taken over the railroads at least 
for the duration of the war, and may take over coal 
mines, and metal resources, as well as the forests and 



142 THE AMEEICAN C0:N'TRIBUTI0N 

water power; it now contemplates the regulation of 
wages. 

The exigency caused by the war, moreover, has trans- 
formed the former practice of international intercourse. 
Co-operation has replaced competition. We are reor- 
ganizing and regulating our industries, our business, 
making sacrifices and preparing to make more sacri- 
fices in order to meet the needs of our Allies, now that 
they are sore beset. Eor a considerable period after 
the war is ended, they will require our aid. We shall 
be better off than any other of the belligerent nations, 
and we shall therefore be called upon to practice, during 
the years of reconstruction, a continuation of the same 
policy of helpfulness. Indeed, for the nations of the 
world to spring, commercially speaking, at one an- 
other's throats would be suicidal even if it were possible. 
Mr. Sidney Webb has thrown a flood of light npon the 
conditions likely to prevail. For example, speculative 
export trade is being replaced by collective importing, 
bringing business more directly under the control of the 
consumer. This has been done by co-operative socie- 
ties, by municipalities and states, in Switzerland, 
France, the United Kingdom, and in Germany. The 
Co-operative Wholesale Society of Great Britain, act- 
ing on behalf of three and a half million families, buys 
two and a half million dollars of purchases annually. 
And the Entente nations, in order to avoid competitive 



THE AMERICAlSr COISTTRIBUTIO]^ 143 

bidding, are buying collectively from us, not only muni- 
tions of war, but other supplies, while the British Gov- 
ernment has made itself the sole importer of such neces- 
sities as wheat, sugar, tea, refrigerated meat, wool, and 
various metals. The French and Italian governments, 
and also certain neutral states, have done likewise. A 
purchasing commission for all the Allies and America 
is now proposed. 

After the war, as an inevitable result, for one thing, 
of transforming some thirty million citizens into sol- 
diers, of engaging a like number of men and women at 
enhanced wages on the manufacture of the requisites of 
war, Mr. Webb predicts a world shortage not only in 
wheat and foodstuffs but in nearly all important raw 
materials. These will be required for the resumption 
of manufacture. In brief, international co-operation 
will be the only means of salvation. The policy of in- 
ternational trade implied by world shortage is not 
founded upon a law of " supply and demand." The 
necessities cannot be permitted to go to those who can 
afford to pay the highest prices, but to those who need 
them most. For the " free play of economic forces " 
would mean famine on a large scale, because the richer 
nations and the richer classes within the nations might 
be fully supplied; but to the detriment and ruin of 
the world the poorer nations and the poorer classes would 
be starved. Therefore governments are already begin- 



144 THE AMEKICA]^ CONTRIBUTION 

ning to give consideration to a new organization of in- 
ternational trade for at least three years after the war. 
Now if this organization produce, as it may produce, 
a more desirable civilization and a happier world- 
order, we are not likely entirely to go back — especially 
in regard to commodities which are necessities — to a 
competitive system. The principle of " priority of 
need '' will supersede the law of " supply and demand." 
And the organizations built up during the war, if they 
prove efficient, will not be abolished. Hours of labour 
and wages in the co-operative League of Nati6ns will 
gradually be equalized, and tariffs will become things of 
the past. " The axiom will be established," says Mr. 
Webb, "that the resources of every country must be 
held for the benefit not only of its own people but of the 
world. . . . The world shortage will, for years to come, 
make import duties look both oppressive and ridicu- 
lous." 

So much may be said for the principle of Democratic 
Control. In spite of all theoretical opposition, circum- 
stances and evolution apparently point to its establish- 
ment. A system that puts a premium on commercial 
greed seems no longer possible. 

The above comments, based on the drift of political 
practice during the past decade and a half, may be 
taken for what they are worth. Predictions are pre- 
carious. The average American will be inclined to 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 145 

regard the program of the new British Labour Party 
as the embodiment of what he vaguely calls Socialism, 
and to him the very word is repugnant. Although he 
may never have heard of Marx, it is the Marxian con- 
ception that comes to his mind, and this implies coer- 
cion, a government that constantly interferes with his 
personal liberty, that compels him to tasks for which 
he has no relish. But your American, and your Eng- 
lishman, for that matter, is inherently an individualist : 
he wants as little government as is compatible with any 
government at all. And the descendants of the con- 
tinental Europeans who flock to our shores are Anglo- 
Saxonized, also become by environment and education 
individualists. The great importance of preserving 
this individualism, this spirit in our citizens of self- 
reliance, this suspicion against too much interference 
with personal liberty, must at once be admitted. And 
any scheme for a social order that tends to eliminate 
and destroy it should by Americans be summarily re- 
jected. 

The question of supreme interest to us, therefore, is 
whether the social order implied in the British pro- 
gram is mainly in the nature of a development of, or a 
break with, the Anglo-Saxon democratic tradition. The 
program is derived from an English source. It is based 
on what is known as modern social science, which has 
as its ultimate sanction the nature of the human mind 



146 THE AMERICAJST CONTEIBUTIOI^ 

as revealed by psychology. A consideration of the 
principles underlying this proposed social order may 
prove that it is essentially — if perhaps paradoxically 
— individualistic, a logical evolution of institutions 
which had their origin in the Magna Charta. Our 
Declaration of Independence proclaimed that every citi- 
zen had the right to " life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness," which means the opportunity to achieve 
the greatest self-development and self-realization. The 
theory is that each citizen shall find his place, according 
to his gifts and abilities, and be satisfied therewith. We 
may discover that this is precisely what social science, 
in an industrial age, and by spiritualizing human effort, 
aims to achieve. We may find that the appearance of 
such a program as that of the British Labour Party, 
supported as it is by an imposing proportion of the 
population of the United Kingdom, marks a further 
step, not only in the advance of social science and de- 
mocracy, but also of Christianity. 

I mention Christianity, not for controversial or 
apologetic reasons, but because it has been the leaven 
of our western civilization ever since the fall of the 
Roman Empire. Its constant influence has been to 
soften and spiritualize individual and national relation- 
ships. The bitter controversies, wars, and persecutions 
which have raged in its name are utterly alien to its 
being. And that the present war is now being fought 



THE AMERICAISr CONTRIBUTIO:^ 147 

by the Allies in the hope of putting an end to war, and 
is thus in the true spirit of Christianity, marks an in- 
comparable advance. 

Almost up to the present day, both in our concep- 
tion and practice of Christianity, we have largely neg- 
lected its most important elements. Christian ortho- 
doxy, as Auguste Sabatier points out, is largely derived 
from the older supernatural religions. The preserva- 
tive shell of dogma and superstition has been cracking, 
and is now ready to burst, and the social teaching of 
Jesus would seem to be the kernel from which has 
sprung modern democracy, modern science, and modern 
religion — a trinity and unity. 

For nearly two thousand years orthodoxy has in- 
sisted that the social principles of Christianity are im- 
practical. And indeed, until the present day, they have 
been so. Physical science, by enormously accelerating 
the means of transportation and communication, has so 
contracted the world as to bring into communion peo- 
ples and races hitherto far apart ; has made possible an 
intelligent organization of industry which, for the first 
time in history, can create a surplus ample to maintain 
in comfort the world's population. But this demands 
the will to co-operation, which is a Christian principle 
— a recognition of the brotherhood of man. Further- 
more, physical science has increased the need for world 
peace and international co-operation because the terri- 



148 THE AMEKICAK C0NTEIBUTI0:N' 

tories of all nations are now subject to swift and terrible 
invasion by modern instruments of destruction, while 
the future submarine may sweep commerce from the 
seas. 

Again, orthodoxy declares that human nature is in- 
herently " bad," while true Christianity, endorsed by 
psychology, proclaims it inherently " good," which 
means that, properly guided, properly educated, it is 
creative and contributive rather than destructive. No 
more striking proof of this fact can be cited than the 
modern experiment in prison reform in which hardened 
convicts, when " given a chance," frequently become 
useful citizens. Unjust and unintelligent social condi- 
tions are the chief factors in making criminals. 

Our most modern system of education, of which Pro- 
fessor John Dewey is the chief protagonist, is based 
upon the assertions of psychology that human nature is 
essentially " good " — creative. Every normal child is 
supposed to have a special ^' distinction " or gift, which 
it is the task of the educator to discover. This distinc- 
tion found, the child achieves happiness in creation and 
contribution. Self-realization demands knowledge and 
training: the doing of right is not a negative but a 
positive act; it is not without significance that the 
Greek word for sin is literally " missing the mark." 
Christianity emphasizes above all else the worth of the 
individual, yet recognizes that the individual can de- 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 149 

velop only in society. And if the individual be of 
great worth, this worth must be by society developed 
to its utmost. Universal suffrage is a logical corol- 
lary. 

Universal suffrage, however, implies individual judg- 
ment, which means that the orthodox principle of ex- 
ternal authority is out of place both in Christianity 
and democracy. The Christian theory is that none shall 
intervene between a man's Maker and himself; de- 
mocracy presupposes that no citizen shall accept his be- 
liefs 'and convictions from others, but shall make up 
his own mind and act accordingly. Openmindedness 
is the first requisite of science and democracy. 

What has been deemed, however, in Christianity the 
most unrealizable ideal is that which may be called 
pacifism — to resist not evil, to turn the other cheek, 
to agree with your adversary while you are in the way 
with him. " I come not," said Jesus, in one of those 
paradoxical statements hitherto so difficult to under- 
stand, " I come not to bring peace, but a sword." It 
is indeed what we are fighting for — peace. But we 
believe today, more strongly than ever before, as de- 
mocracy advances, as peoples tend to gain more and 
more control over their governments, that even this may 
not be an unrealizable ideal. Democracies, intent on 
self-realization and self-development, do not desire war. 

The problem of social science, then, appears to be to 



160 THE AMEKICAIT CONTKIBUTION 

organize human society on the principles and ideals of 
Christianity. But in view of the fact that the trend 
of evolution is towards the elimination of commercial 
competition, the question which must seriously concern 
us today is — What in the future shall be the spur 
of individual initiative ? Orthodoxy and even demo- 
cratic practice have hitherto taken it for granted — in 
spite of the examples of highly socialized men, bene- 
factors of society — that the average citizen will bestir 
himself only for material gain. And it must be ad- 
mitted that competition of some sort is necessary for 
self-realization, that human nature demands a prize. 
There can be no self-sacrifice without a corresponding 
self-satisfaction. The answer is that in the theory of 
democracy, as well as in that of Christianity, individual- 
ism and co-operation are paradoxically blended. For 
competition, Christianity substitutes emulation. And 
with democracy, it declares that mankind itself can 
gradually be raised towards the level of the choice in- 
dividual who does not labour for gain, but in behalf of 
society. For the process of democracy is not degrading, 
but lifting. Like Christianity, democracy demands 
faith, and has as its inspiring interpretation of civiliza- 
tion evolution towards a spiritual goal. Yet the kind 
of faith required is no longer a blind faith, but one 
founded on sane and carefully evolved theories. De- 
mocracy has become a scientific experiment. 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 151 

In this connection, as one notably inspired by emu- 
lation, by the joy of creative work and service, the 
medical profession comes first to mind. The finer 
element in this profession is constantly increasing in 
numbers, growing more and more influential, making 
life less easy for the quack, the vendor of nostrums, 
the commercial proprietor of the bogus medical college. 
The doctor who uses his talents for gain is frowned 
upon by those of his fellow practitioners whose opin- 
ion really counts. Respected physicians in our cities 
give much of their time to teaching, animating students 
with their own spirit; and labour long hours, for no 
material return, in the clinics of the poor. And how 
often, in reading our newspapers, do we learn that some 
medical scientist, by patient work, and often at the 
risk of life and health, has triumphed over a scourge 
which has played havoc with humanity throughout the 
ages! Typhoid has been conquered, and infant paral- 
ysis; gangrene and tetanus, which have taken such tall 
of the wounded in Flanders and France; yellow fever 
has been stamped out in the tropics ; hideous lesions are 
now healed by a system of drainage. The very list of 
these achievements is bewildering, and latterly we are 
given hope of the prolongation of life itself. Here in 
truth are Christian deeds multiplied by science, made 
possible by a growing knowledge of and mastery over 
Nature. 



152 THE AMERICA:Nr CONTRIBUTION 

Such men by virtue of their high mission are above 
the vicious social and commercial competition poison- 
ing the lives of so many of their fellow citizens. In 
our democracy they have found their work, and the 
work is its own reward. They give striking testimony 
to the theory that absorption in a creative or contribu- 
tive task is the only source of self-realization. And he 
has little faith in mankind who shall declare that the 
medical profession is the only group capable of being 
socialized, or, rather, of socializing themselves — for 
such is the true process of democracy. Public opinion 
should be the leaven. What is possible for the doctor 
is also possible for the lawyer, for the teacher. In a 
democracy, teaching should be the most honoured of 
the professions, and indeed once was, — before the 
advent of industrialism, when it gradually fell into 
neglect, — occasionally into deplorable submission to 
the possessors of wealth. Yet a wage disgracefully 
low, hardship, and even poverty have not hindered men 
of ability from entering it in increasing numbers, re- 
nouncing ease and luxuries. The worth of the contri- 
butions of our professors to civilization has been in- 
estimable; and fortunately signs are not lacking that 
we are coming to an appreciation of the value of the 
expert in government, who is replacing the panderer 
and the politician. A new solidarity of teaching pro- 
fessional opinion, together with a growing realization 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 153 

by our public of the primary importance of the calling, 
is tending to emancipate it, to establish it in its rightful 
place. 

Nor are our engineers without their ideal. A Goe- 
thals did not cut an isthmus in two for gain. 

Industrialism, with its concomitant " corporation " 
practice, has undoubtedly been detrimental to the legal 
profession, since it has resulted in large fees; in the 
accumulation of vast fortunes, frequently by methods 
ethically questionable. Grave social injustices have 
been done, though often in good faith, since the lawyer, 
by training and experience, has hitherto been least 
open to the teachings of the new social science, has 
been an honest advocate of the system of laissez faire. 
But to say that the American legal profession is with- 
out ideals and lacking in the emulative spirit would 
be to do it a grave injustice. The increasing influence 
of national and state bar associations evidences a pro- 
fessional opinion discouraging to the unscrupulous ; 
while a new evolutionary and more humanitarian con- 
ception of law is now beginning to be taught, and young 
men are entering the ranks imbued with this. Legal 
clinics, like medical clinics, are established for the 
benefit of those who cannot afford to pay fees, for the 
protection of the duped from the predatory quack. And 
it must be said of this profession, which hitherto has 
held a foremost place in America, that its leaders have 



154 THE AMEEICAlSr CONTKIBUTIOIT 

never hesitated to respond to a public call, to sacrifice 
their practices to serve the nation. Their highest am- 
bition has even been to attain the Supreme Court, where 
the salary is a mere pittance compared to what they 
may earn as private citizens. 

Thus we may review all the groups in the nation, 
but the most significant transformation of all is taking 
place within the business group, — where indeed it 
might be least expected. Even before the war there 
were many evidences that the emulative spirit in busi- 
ness had begun to modify the merely competitive, and 
we had the spectacle of large employers of labour awak- 
ening to the evils of industrialism, and themselves at- 
tempting to inaugurate reforms. As in the case of 
labour, it would be obviously unfair to claim that the 
employer element was actuated by motives of self-in- 
terest alone ; nor were their concessions due only to 
fear. Instances could be cited, if there were space, of 
voluntary shortening of hours of labour, of raising of 
wages, when no coercion was exerted either by the labour 
unions or the state ; and — perhaps to their surprise — 
employers discovered that such acts were not only hu- 
mane but profitable ! Among these employers, in fact, 
may be observed individuals in various stages of en- 
lightenment, from the few who have educated themselves 
in social science, who are convinced that the time has 
come when it is not only practicable but right, who 



THE AMERICAN C0:NTRIBUTI0:N" 155 

realize that a new era has dawned; to others who still 
believe in the old system, who are trying to holster it up 
by granting concessions, by establishing committees of 
conference, by giving a voice and often a financial in- 
terest, but not a vote, in the conduct of the corporation 
concerned. These are the counterpart, in industry, of 
sovereigns whose sway has been absolute, whose inten- 
tions are good, but who hesitate, often from conviction, 
to grant constitutions. Yet even these are responding 
in some degree to social currents, though the aggressive 
struggles of labour may have influenced them, and par- 
tially opened their eyes. They are far better than 
their associates who still seek to control the supplies of 
food and other necessities, whose efficiency is still solely 
directed, not toward a social end, but toward the amass- 
ing of large fortunes, and is therefore wasted so far 
as society is concerned. They do not perceive that by 
seeking to control prices they merely hasten the tend- 
ency of government control, for it is better to have 
government regulation for the benefit of the many than 
proprietary control, however efficient, for the benefit 
of the few. 

That a significant change of heart and mind has be- 
gun to take place amongst capitalists, that the nucleus 
of a " public opinion " has been formed within an ele- 
ment which, by the use and wont of business and hab- 
its of thought might be regarded as least subject to the 



156 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 

influence of social ideas, is a most hopeful augury. 
This nascent opinion has begun to operate by shaming 
unscrupulous and recalcitrant employers into better 
practices. It would indeed fare ill with democracy if, 
in such an era, men of large business proved to be lack- 
ing in democratic initiative, wholly unreceptive and 
hostile to the gradual introduction of democracy into 
industry, which means the perpetuation of the Ameri- 
can Idea. Fortunately, with us, this capitalistic ele- 
ment is of comparatively recent growth, the majority 
of its members are essentially Americans; they have 
risen from small beginnings, and are responsive to a 
democratic appeal — if that appeal be properly pre- 
sented. And, as a matter of fact, for many years a 
leaven had been at work among them ; the truth has been 
brought home to them that the mere acquisition of 
wealth brings neither happiness nor self-realization; 
they have lavished their money on hospitals and uni- 
versities, clinics, foundations for scientific research, and 
other gifts of inestimable benefit to the nation and man- 
kind. Although the munificence was on a Medicean 
scale, this private charity was in accord with the older 
conception of democracy, and paved the way for a 
new order. 

The patriotic and humanitarian motive aroused by 
the war greatly accelerated the socializing transforma- 
tion of the business man and the capitalist. We have, 



THE AMEKICA:^ contribution 157 

indeed, our profiteers seeking short cuts to luxury and 
wealth ; but those happily most representative of Amer- 
ican affairs, including the creative administrators, has- 
tened to Washington with a willingness to accept any 
position in which they might be useful, and in numer- 
ous instances placed at the disposal of the government 
the manufacturing establishments which, by industry 
and ability, they themselves had built up. That in 
thus surrendering the properties for which they were 
largely responsible they hoped at the conclusion of 
peace to see restored the status quo ante should not be 
held against them. Some are now beginning to sur- 
mise that a complete restoration is impossible; and as 
a result of their socializing experience, are even won- 
dering whether it is desirable. These are beginning to 
perceive that the national and international organiza- 
tions in the course of construction to meet the demands 
of the world conflict must form the model for a future 
social structure ; that the unprecedented pressure caused 
by the cataclysm is compelling a recrystallization of 
society in which there must be fewer misfits, in which 
many more individuals than formerly shall find public 
or semi-public tasks in accordance with their gifts and 
abilities. 

It may be argued that war compels socialization, that 
after the war the world will perforce return to material- 
istic individualism. But this calamity, terrible above 



158 THE AMEKICAlSr CONTEIBUTION 

all others, has warned us of the imperative need of an 
order that shall be socializing, if we are not to witness 
the destruction of our civilization itself. Confidence 
that such an order, thanks to the advancement of sci- 
ence, is now within our grasp should not be difficult for 
Americans, once thej have rightly conceived it. We, 
who have always pinned our faith to ideas, who entered 
the conflict for an Idea, must be the last to shirk the 
task, however Herculean, of world reconstruction along 
the lines of our own professed faith. We cannot be 
renegades to Democracy. 

Above all things, then, it is essential for us as a 
people not to abandon our faith in man, our belief that 
not only the exceptional individual but the majority 
of mankind can be socialized. What is true of our 
physicians, our scientists and professional men, our 
manual workers, is also true of our capitalists and 
business men. In a more just and intelligent organ- 
ization of society these will be found willing to admin- 
ister and improve for the common weal the national 
resources which formerly they exploited for the bene- 
fit of themselves and their associates. The social re- 
sponse, granted the conditions, is innate in humanity, 
and individual initiative can best be satisfied in social 
realization. 



THE AMEKICA:N^ COKTKIBUTIO]^ 159 



YI 

Universal education is the cornerstone of democracy. 
And the recog-nition of this fact may be called the great 
American contribution. But in our society the fullest 
self-realization depends upon a well balanced knowl- 
edge of scientific facts, upon a rounded culture. Thus 
education, properly conceived, is a preparation for in- 
telligent, ethical, and contented citizenship. Upon the 
welfare of the individual depends the welfare of all. 
Without education, free institutions and universal suf- 
frage are mockeries; semi-learned masses of the popu- 
lation are at the mercy of scheming politicians, con- 
troversialists, and pseudo-scientific religionists, and 
their votes are swayed by prejudice. 

In a materialistic competitive order, success in life 
depends upon the knack — innate or acquired, and not 
to be highly rated — of outwitting one's neighbour 
under the rules of the game — the law; education is 
merely a cultural leaven within the reach of the com- 
paratively few who can afford to attend a university. 
The business college is a more logical institution. In 
an emulative civilization, however, the problem is to 
discover and develop in childhood and youth the per- 
sonal aptitude or gift of as many citizens as possible, 
in order that they may find self-realization by making 



160 THE AMERICAlSr CONTRIBUTION 

their peculiar contribution towards the advancement of 
society. 

The prevailing system of education, which we have 
inherited from the past, largely fails to accomplish this. 
In the first place, it has been authoritative rather than 
scientific, which is to say that students have been in- 
duced to accept the statements of teachers and text books, 
and have not been trained to weigh for themselves their 
reasonableness and worth ; a principle essentially un- 
scientific and undemocratic, since it inculcates in the 
future citizen convictions rather than encourages the 
habit of openmindedness so necessary for democratic 
citizenship. For democracy — it cannot be too often 
repeated — is a dynamic thing, experimental, creative 
' in its very essence. No static set of opinions can apply 
to the constantly changing aspect of affairs. New dis- 
coveries, which come upon us with such bewildering 
rapidity, are apt abruptly to alter social and industrial 
conditions, while morals and conventions are no longer 
absolute. Sudden crises threaten the stability of na- 
tions and civilizations. Safety lies alone in the ability 
to go forward, to progress. Psychology teaches us that 
if authoritative opinions, convictions, or " complexes '' 
are stamped upon the plastic brain of the youth they 
tend to harden, and he is apt to become a Democrat 
or Republican, an Episcopalian or a Baptist, a free 
trader or a tariff advocate or a Manchester economist 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 161 

without asking why. Such " complexes " were prob- 
ably referred to by the celebrated physician who em- 
phasized the hopelessness of most individuals over forty. 
And every reformer and forum lecturer knows how 
difficult it is to convert the average audience of sea- 
soned adults to a new idea: he finds the most respon- 
sive groups in the universities and colleges. It is sig- 
nificant that the ^' educated " adult audiences in clubs 
and prosperous churches are the least open to conver- 
sion, because, in the scientific sense, the '^ educated " 
classes retain complexes, and hence are the least pre- 
pared to cope with the world as it is today. The Ger- 
man system, which has been bent upon installing au- 
thoritative conviction instead of encouraging freedom 
of thought, should be a warning to us. 

Again, outside of the realm of physical science, our 
text books have been controversial rather than impar- 
tial, especially in economics and history; resulting in 
erroneous and distorted and prejudiced ideas of events, 
such for instance, as our American Revolution. The 
day of the controversialist is happily coming to an end, 
and of the writer who twists the facts of science to suit 
a world of his own making, or of that of a group with 
which he is associated. Theory can now be labelled 
theory, and fact, fact. Impartial and painstaking in- 
vestigation is the sole method of obtaining truth. 

The old system of education benefited only the com- 



162 THE AMERICAN C0NTRIBUTI0:N' 

parativelj few to whose nature and inclination it was 
adapted. We have need, indeed, of classical scholars, 
but the majority of men and women are meant for other 
work; many, by their very construction of mind, are 
unfitted to become such. And only in the most excep- 
tional cases are the ancient languages really mastered; 
a smattering of these, imposed upon the unwilling 
scholar by a principle opposed to psychology, — a smat- 
tering from which is derived no use and joy in after 
life, and which has no connection with individual in- 
clination — is worse than nothing. Precious time is 
wasted during the years when the mind is most re- 
ceptive. While the argument of the old school that 
discipline can only be inculcated by the imposition of a 
distasteful task is unsound. As Professor Dewey 
points out, unless the interest is in some way involved 
there can be no useful discipline. And how many of 
our university and high school graduates today are 
in any sense disciplined ? Stimulated interest alone 
can overcome the resistance imposed by a difficult task, 
as any scientist, artist, organizer or administrator 
knows. Men will discipline themselves to gain a de- 
sired end. Under the old system of education a few 
children succeed either because they are desirous of 
doing well, interested in the game of mental competi- 
tion ; or else because they contrive to clothe with flesh 
and blood some subject presented as a skeleton. It is 



THE AMEKICAN CONTKIBUTION 163 

not uncommon, indeed, to recognize in later years with 
astonishment a useful citizen or genius whom at school 
or college we recall as a dunce or laggard. In our 
present society, because of archaic methods of educa- 
tion, the development of such is largely left to chance. 
Those who might have been developed in time, who 
might have found their task, often become wasters, 
drudges, and even criminals. 

The old system tends to make types, to stamp every 
scholar in the same mould, whether he fits it or not. 
More and more the parents of today are looking about 
for new schools, insisting that a son or daughter pos- 
sesses some special gift which, under teachers of genius, 
might be developed before it is too late. And in most 
cases, strange to say, the parents are right. They them- 
selves have been victims of* a standardized system. 

A new and distinctly American system of education, 
designed to meet the demands of modern conditions, has 
been put in practice in parts of the United States. In 
spite of opposition from school boards, from all those 
who cling to the conviction that education must of neces- 
sity be an unpalatable and " disciplinary " process, the 
number of these schools is growing. The objection, put 
forth by many, that they are still in the experimental 
stage, is met by the reply that experiment is the very 
essence of the system. Democracy is experimental, and 
henceforth education will remain experimental for all 



164 THE AMERICAISr CONTRIBUTION^ 

time. But, as in any other branch of science, the ele- 
ment of ascertained fact will gradually increase: the 
latent possibilities in the mind of the healthy child will 
be discovered by knowledge gained through impartial 
investigation. The old system, like all other institu- 
tions handed down to us from the ages, proceeds on no 
intelligent theory, has no basis on psychology, and is 
accepted merely because it exists. 

The new education is selective. The mind of each 
child is patiently studied with the view of discovering 
the peculiar bent, and this bent is guided and encour- 
aged. The child is allowed to forge ahead in those sub- 
jects for which he shows an aptitude, and not compelled 
to wait on a class. Such supervision, of course, de- 
mands more teachers, teachers of an ability hitherto 
deplorably rare, and thoroughly trained in their sub- 
jects, with a sympathetic knowledge of the human 
mind. Theirs will be the highest and most responsi- 
ble function in the state, and they must be rewarded in 
proportion to their services. 

A superficial criticism declares that in the new schools 
children will study only " what they like." On the 
contrary, all subjects requisite for a wide culture, as 
well as for the ability to cope with existence in a highly 
complex civilization, are insisted upon. It is true, how- 
ever, that the trained and gifted teacher is able to dis- 
cover a method of so presenting a subject as to seize the 



THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 165 

imagination and arouse the interest and industry of a 
majority of pupils. In the modern schools French, for 
example, is really taught ; pupils do not acquire a mere 
smattering of the language. And, what is more im- 
portant, the course of study is directly related to life, 
and to practical experience, instead of being set forth 
abstractly, as something which at the time the pupil 
perceives no possibility of putting into use. At one of 
the new schools in the south, the ignorant child of the 
mountains at once acquires a knowledge of measure- 
ment and elementary arithmetic by laying out a gar- 
den, of letters by inscribing his name on a little sign- 
board in order to identify his patch — for the moment 
private property. And this principle is carried through 
all the grades. In the Gary Schools and elsewhere the 
making of things in the shops, the modelling of a Pan- 
ama Canal, the inspection of industries and governmen- 
tal establishments, the designing, building, and decora- 
tion of houses, the discussion and even dramatization of 
the books read, — all are a logical and inevitable con- 
tinuation of the abstract knowledge of the schoolroom. 
The success of the direct application of learning to in- 
dustrial and professional life may also be observed in 
such colleges as those at Cincinnati and Schenectady, 
where young men spend half the time of the course in 
the shops of manufacturing corporations, often earning 
more than enough to pay their tuition. 



166 THE AMEEICAIT CO:N'TKIBUTIOiT 

Children are not only prepared for democratic citi- 
zenship by being encouraged to think for themselves, 
but also to govern and discipline themselves. On the 
moral side, under the authoritative system of lay and 
religious training, character v^as acquired at the ex- 
pense of mental flexibility — the Puritan method; our 
problem today, which the new system undertakes, is to 
produce character with openmindedness — the kind of 
character possessed by many great scientists. Absorp- 
tion in an appropriate task creates a moral will, while 
science, knowledge, informs the mind why a thing 
is " bad " or " good,'' disintegrating or upbuilding. 
Moreover, these children are trained for democratic gov- 
ernment by the granting of autonomy. They have their 
own elected officials, their own courts; their decisions 
are, of course, subject to reversal by the principal, but 
in practice this seldom occurs. 

The Gary Schools and many of the new schools are 
public schools. And the principle of the new education 
that the state is primarily responsible for the health of 
pupils — because an unsound body is apt to make an 
unsound citizen of backward intelligence — is now be- 
ing generally adopted by public schools all over the 
country. This idea is essentially an element of the 
democratic contention that all citizens must be given 
an equality of opportunity — though all may not be 
created equal — now becoming a positive rather than 



THE AMERICA:^" CONTEIBUTIOlSr 167 

a negative right, guaranteed by the state itself. An 
earnest attempt is thus made bj the state to give every 
citizen a fair start that in later years he may have no 
ground for discontent or complaint. He stands on his 
own feet, he rises in proportion to his ability and in- 
dustry. Hence the program of the British Labour 
Party rightly lays stress on education, on ^' freedom of 
mental opportunity." The vast sums it proposes to 
spend for this purpose are justified. 

If such a system of education as that briefly outlined 
above is carefully and impartially considered, the ob- 
jection that democratic government founded on modern 
social science is coercive must disappear. So far as 
the intention and effort of the state is able to confer it, 
every citizen will have his choice of the task he is to 
perform for society, his opportunity for self-realization. 
For freedom without education is a myth. By degrees 
men and women are making ready to take their places 
in an emulative rather than a materialistically competi- 
tive order. But the experimental aspect of this system 
should always be borne in mind, with the fact that its 
introduction and progress, like that of other elements 
in the democratic program, must be gradual, though al- 
ways proceeding along sound lines. Eor we have ar- 
rived at that stage of enlightenment when we realize 
that the only mundane perfection lies in progress rather 
than achievement. The millennium is always a lap 



168 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 

ahead. There would be no satisfaction in overtaking 
it, for then we should have nothing more to do, nothing 
more to work for. 



yii 

The German Junkers have prostituted science by 
employing it for the destruction of humanity. In the 
name of Christianity they have waged the most bar- 
baric war in history. Yet if they shall have demon- 
strated to mankind the futility of efficiency achieved 
merely for material ends; if, by throwing them on a 
world screen, they shall have revealed the evils of power 
upheld alone by ruthlessness and force, they will un- 
wittingly have performed a world service. Privilege 
and dominion, powers and principalities acquired by 
force must be sustained by force. To fail will be fatal. 
Even a duped people, trained in servility, will not con- 
sent to be governed by an unsuccessful autocracy. Ar- 
rogantly Germany has staked her all on world domina- 
tion. Hence a victory for the Allies must mean a 
democratic Germany. 

Nothing short of victory. There can be no arrange- 
ment, no agreement, no parley with or confidence in 
these modern scions of darkness — Hohenzollerns, Hin- 
denburgs, Ludendorffs and their tools. Propaganda 
must not cease; the eyes of Germans still capable of 



THE AMERICAN CONTEIBUTION 169 

sight must be opened. But, as the President says, force 
must be used to the limit — force for a social end as 
opposed to force for an evil end. There are those 
among us who advocate a boycott of Germany after 
peace is declared. These would seem to take it for 
granted that we shall fall short of victory, and hence 
that selfish retaliative or vindictive practices between 
nations, sanctioned by imperialism, will continue to 
flourish after the war. But should Germany win she 
will see to it that there is no boycott against her. A 
compromised peace would indeed mean the perpetua- 
tion of both imperialism and militarism. 

It is characteristic of those who put their faith in 
might alone that they are not only blind to the finer 
relationships between individuals and nations, but take 
no account of the moral forces in human affairs which 
in the long run are decisive, — a lack of sensitiveness 
which explains Germany's colossal blunders. The first 
had to do with Britain. The German militarists per- 
sisted in the belief that the United Kingdom was de- 
generated by democracy, intent upon the acquisition 
of wealth, distracted by strife at home, uncertain of 
the Empire, and thus would selfishly remain aloof 
while the Kaiser's armies overran and enslaved the 
continent. What happened, to Germany's detriment, 
was the instant socialization of Britain, and the 
binding together of the British Empire. Germany's 



170 THE AMERICA:^r CONTRIBUTIO:^^ 

second great blunder was an arrogant underestimation 
of a self-reliant people of English culture and traditions. 
She believed that we, too, had been made flabby by 
democracy, were wholly intent upon the pursuit of the 
dollar — only to learn that America would lavish her 
vast resources and shed her blood for a cause which was 
American. Germany herself provided that cause, 
shaped the issues so that there was no avoiding them. 
She provided the occasion for the socializing of America 
also ; and thus brought about, within a year, a national 
transformation which in times of peace might scarce in 
half a century have been accomplished. 

Above all, as a consequence of these two blunders, 
Germany has been compelled to witness the consumma- 
tion of that which of all things she had most to fear, the 
cementing of a lasting fellowship between the English 
speaking Eepublic and the English speaking Empire. 
For we had been severed since the 18th Century by 
misunderstandings which of late Germany herself had 
been more or less successful in fostering. She has 
furnished a bond not only between our governments, but 
— what is vastly more important for democracy — a 
bond between our peoples. Our soldiers are now side by 
side with those of the Empire on the Frontier of 
Freedom; the blood of all is shed and mingled for a 
great cause embodied in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of 
democracy ; and our peoples, through the realization of 



THE AMERICAN COISTTEIBUTIOK 171 

cominon ideas and common ends, are learning the su- 
preme lesson of co-operation between nations with a 
common past, are being cemented into a union which is 
the symbol and forerunner of the democratic League of 
Nations to come. Henceforth, we believe, because of 
this union, so natural yet so long delayed, by virtue of 
the ultimate victory it forecasts, the sun will never set 
on the Empire of the free, for the drum beats of democ- 
racy have been heard around the world. To this Em- 
pire will be added the precious culture of France, which 
the courage of her sons will have preserved, the con- 
tributions of Italy, and of Russia, yes, and of Japan. 

Our philosophy and our religion are changing ; hence 
it is more and more difficult to use the old terms to 
describe moral conduct. We say, for instance, that 
America's action in entering the war has been ^' unself- 
ish.'^ But this merely means that we have our own 
convictions concerning the ultimate comfort of the 
world, the manner of self-realization of individuals and 
nations. We are attempting to turn calamity into good. 
If this terrible conflict shall, result in the inauguration 
of an emulative society, if it shall bring us to the recog- 
nition that intelligence and science may be used for the 
upbuilding of such an order, and for an eventual 
achievement of world peace, every sacrifice shall have 
been justified. 



172 THE AMERICA]^ COlSrTRIBUTIO:^' 

Such is the American Issue. Our statesmen and 
thinkers have helped to evolve it, our people with their 
blood and treasure are consecrating it. And these 
statesmen and thinkers, of whom our American Presi- 
dent is not the least, are of democracy the pioneers. 
Erom the mountain tops on which they stand they be- 
hold the features of the new world, the dawn of the new 
day hidden as yet from their brothers in the valley. Let 
us have faith always that it is coming, and struggle on, 
highly resolving that those who gave their lives in the 
hour of darkness shall not have died in vain. 



THE END 



FEINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



HTHE following pages contain advertisements of 
Macmillan books by the same author. 



The Dwelling Place of Light 

By WINSTON CHURCHILL 

Author of "The Inside of the Cup," ''Richard Carvel," etc. 
With frontispiece by Arthur I. Keller. 

Cloth, i2mo., $i.6o 

"One of the most absorbing and fascinating romances, 
and one of the most finished masterpieces of serious literary 
art which have appeared in this year or in this century." — 
New York Tribune, 

*Tt is a powerful story, wonderfully told, the gifted author 
has succeeded in gripping the reader's attention and in 
holding his interest to the very last. , . . Janet is a charac- 
ter that will live, for there are thousands of young women 
who will recognize in her some phase of their own experi- 
ence and some of their own aspirations." — Philadelphia 
Ledger, 

"He has never hitherto depicted a woman character with 
quite so much insight, skill and surety as he portrays Janet 
Bumpus." — New York Times. 

America, dynamic, changing, diverse, with new laws and 
old desires, new industries and old social rights, new people 
and old — this is the environment in which Mr. Churchill 
places the heroine of his new book. He has never written 
a more entertaining story ; he has never written one that is 
more significant in its interpretation of human relation- 
ships to-day. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue Kew YorK 



A Far Country 



By WINSTON CHURCHILL 

Author of " The Inside of the Cup," etc. 

Illustrated, $i.^0 

"No one can afford to miss reading 'A Far Country/ or read- 
ing it can fail to be interested. The themes Mr. Churchill handles 
are the big themes confronting all America and in the fortunes and 
misfortunes of his characters he indicates energies and developments 
that are nation-wide. It touches on what is vital . . - and it will 
help in no small degree to broaden our thought and clarify our vis- ' 
ion. Many people read ^The Inside of the Cup,' but 'A Far Coua-( 
try' should reach a wider audience." — A^eiv York Times. 

"A powerfully written story, displaying wonderful scope and clar- 
ity of vision. Presents a wonderful study of American emotions." 

— Boston Globe, 

" A story worthily complete . . . vastly encouraging. The kind 
of a book that points to a hope and a right road." 

— New York World, 

" Mr. Churchill has done a difficult thing well. . . . We congrat- 
ulate him on an achievement well worth while." — Chicago Post. 

"A great piece of art, comprising admirable humanization, plot 
and sympathy, diverse as intrinsic . . . and many interesting side 
issues. Any author might well be proud of such an achievement." 

— Chicago Herald. 

"<A Far Country'" is a strong story that is vital and compelling. 
\ • • Adds one more leaf to Mr. Churchill's literary laurels." 

— Philadelphia Ledger, 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Piil)li8hers 6^66 Fifth Avenue New Tosk 



**The Most Profoundly Interesting Novel of the Times*^ 



The Inside of the Cup 



By WINSTON CHURCHILL 

Author of "Richard Carvel," "The Crisis," "The Crossing," "The Celebrity," 
"Coniston," "Mr. Crewe's Career," "A Modern Chronicle" 

Illustrated, cloth, $1.50 

"A book tremendously in earnest, stamped with the zeal of a man who is setting 
forth in it truths of the greatest significance to his fellowmen. . ._ . The stage set- 
ting and the actors are typical of our American present-day civilization. They 
Strike true of our well-to-do society in any of our large cities. Those who are in- 
terested in present-day currents of thought will read this book with profound in- 
terest and will be thankful that Mr. Churchill was moved to write it. 'The Inside 
of the Cup' is not only significant as an indication of modern tendencies, it fur- 
nishes also a valuable contribution to a cause that grows more and more vital." 
— New York Times. 

"A novel which ought to arouse as much comment as ' Robert Elsmere ' did twenty- 
five years ago. The story is told with far greater skill than Mrs. Ward showed in 
'Robert Elsmere' or its successors. There is a love story, which is extremely well 
told, and there are fine characterizations, notably of Eldon Parr, the big financier. 
He will stand with Jethro Bass, the poUtical boss in 'Coniston,'_as a proof of Mr. 
Churchill's power to seize and portray reahties. The scenes with the woman of 
the slums, too, are vivid and would come over the footUghts with great dramatic 
force, if it were possible to dramatize the book." — Brooklyn Eagle. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

A Modern Chronicle 



Illustrated, $1.50 



This, Mr. Churchill's first great presentation of the Eternal Feminine, is through- 
out a profound study of a fascinating young American woman. It is frankly a 
modern love story. 

"The most thorough and artistic work the author has yet turned out. A very 
interesting story and a faithful picture of character . . . one that will give rise to 
much discussion." — New York Sun. 

"A brilliant tale. His Honora has rare beauty of soul and body, and best of 
all she is comprehensible and real." — Boston Herald. 

"Nothing that Winston Churchill has done has quite reached the high-water 
mark of this cross-section of contemporary American Ufe, cut so from the heart of 
things that every nerve and vein and fibre of it, show their connection with the 
human news of the hour." — Albany Argus. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



The Crossing 



Illustrated, $1.50 



"A thoroughly interesting book, packed with exciting adventure and 
sentimental incident, yet faithful to historical fact both in detail and in 
spirit." — The Dial. 

"Mr. Churchill's novel is a vigorous and absorbing love story." — The 
Seattle Times. 

"Deals with one of the most fascinating dramas in the history of the world. 
It is brimming with interest." — Brooklyn Eagle. 

"So widespread is Winston Churchill's popularity, so breathless the 
public interest excited by each anxiously awaited new novel from his pen, 
that one is perforce compelled to pay him the compliment of early reading 
and thorough consideration. But his achievement is noteworthy. . . . 

"'The Crossing' is, moreover, far in advance of 'The Crisis.' It is more 
real, more genuine, more spontaneous, more vigorous, a clearer and more 
coherent picture of its times. It contains no little humor." — Boston 
Transcript. 

The Crisis illustrated, $1.50 

"A charming love story that never loses its interest. . . . The intense 
political bitterness, the intense patriotism of both parties, are shown un- 
derstandingly." — Evening Telegraph, Philadelphia. 

"In some respects 'Richard Carvel' was a new thing; by comparison 
*The Crisis' is something that has been done often before, but never done 
so well. The vivacity, variety and spirit of the old Southern social life 
have never been so well suggested, not even in 'Red Rock.' The women are 
altogether delightful — Mr. Churchill's forte is fascinating and spirited 
patrician women." — Boston Herald. 

"There have been many novels built upon the interests aroused and 
stilled by the Civil War, but there has been none surpassing this in truth 
and power." — Argonaut, San Francisco. 

"It is a high office to give a new generation of Americans their first vivid 
conception of the struggle in which the Nation was reborn." — The Review 
of Reviews. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

PabUshers 64-66 Fifth Aveam* Hew Tork 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

ConiStOn illustrated, $1.50 

"A lighter, gayer spirit and a deeper, tenderer touch than Mr. Churchill 
has ever achieved before. . . . One of the truest and finest transcripts 
of modem American life thus far achieved in our fiction." — Chicago Record- 
Herald. 

Pall Mall Gazette. — "There is not a page without its interest, colour, 
and significance." 

"'Coniston* is a thoroughly characteristic American novel . . . among 
the small company of the best." — Chicago Tribune. 

"'Coniston' is, first of all, a delightful love story, vigorous, vibrant, and 
realistic .... the great novel of the year." — Philadelphia North American. 

"Mr. Churchill has more of the epic quality than any writer now living. 
In 'Coniston' there is not a page without its interest, color, significance, and 
all contributory to that unity of character and meaning which decides for 
a work of art the question of performance." — London Times. 

"The drawing of the character of Jethro Bass is a masterpiece of litera- 
ture." — St. Louis Globe-Democrat. 

The Celebrity $1.50 

AN EPISODE 

"No such piece of inimitable comedy in a literary way has appeared for 
years. It is the purest, keenest fun." — Chicago Inter-Ocean. 

"... The most delightful surprise to the usual novel reader." — New 
Orleans Times-Democrat. 

"One of the best stories that have come from the presses." — Brooklyn 
Eagle. 

"A delightful entertaining novel." — Boston Courier, 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenne New Tork 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Mr. Crewe's Career ciom, i2mc, $1.50 

Illustrated by Mr. Keller and the Kinneys 

"Representative of conditions to be found in every State of the Union. 'Mr. 
Crewe's Career' is one of the greatest of American novels." 

"Mr. Churchill rises to a level he has never known before and gives us one of the 
best stories of American life ever written. ... It is written out of a sympathy that 
goes deep. . . . We go on to the end with glowing appreciation. ... It is good 
to have such a book." — New York Tribune. 

"American reaUsm, American romance, and American doctrine, all overtraced 
by the kindUest, most appeaUng American humor." — New York World. 

"It is an honest and fair story. ... It is very interesting; and the heroine is 
a type of woman as fresh, original, and captivating as any that has appeared in 
American novels for a long time past." — The Outlook. 

"We go 'way back and sit down before 'Mr. Crewe's Career,' which The Mac- 
millan Company publishes to-day. The new story has all the author's virtues — 
which are many — and almost none of his faults. It is some fifty pages shorter 
than 'Coniston,' and we would willingly have read fifty pages more. . . . The 
love story of Victoria FUnt, the railroad president's daughter, and Austen Vane, the 
railroad's chief counsel's rebelUous son, is a golden one. There is something starry 
and vivid about Mr. Churchill's heroine that recalls Meredith's Miss Middleton — 
and Clara, we have Stevenson's word for it, 'is the nicest girl that was ever in a 
book.' In short, 'Mr. Crewe's Career' is a fine a'^hievement, of which Mr. 
Churchill and his countrymen may be proud, and it is, moreover, a truly representa- 
tive and distinctly American novel." — New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser. 

Richard Carvel $1.50 

Illustrated by Carlton T. Chapman and Malcolm Frazer 

"In breadth of canvas, massing of dramatic eflE^ect, depth of feeling and rare 
wholesomeness of spirit, has seldom, if ever, been surpassed by an American ro- 
mance." — Chicago Tribune. 

"One of the most brilUant works of imagination of the decade. It breathes the 
spirit of fine romance . . . in a way that is truly fascinating." — The Philadelphia 
Press. 

"Contains, besides a score of characters which are worth remembering, a few 
which one could not forget if one should try." — N . Y. Globe. 

"The book altogether is a delightful one, abounding in powerful scenes, with a 
romance running charmingly through is pages, and to many the most interesting 
features of all will be the clever pen-pictures of some of the greatest men of those 
stirring times." — The Evening Telegraph, Phila. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-86 Fifth Avenue Hew York 



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